


To be blind when you're born

by Whit Merule (whit_merule)



Category: Cats - Andrew Lloyd Webber
Genre: Coming of Age, F/F, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Genderqueer Character, Historical References, M/M, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Multi, Open Relationships, Polyamory, all cats are magical, because they are cats, cats are actually cats, chaos kittens make chaos, munkustrap is trying his best okay
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-22
Updated: 2020-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:28:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22360339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whit_merule/pseuds/Whit%20Merule
Summary: London, February 1939 - and an inquisitive black cat is learning how to grow up.It starts with a pair of tiger-striped rogues with identical grins breaking into his humans' house. Then it's a whole new world to discover, full of fascinating cats who all have a little magic and a little wisdom of their own.The world is changing - the humans are acting strangely, and there are very strange rumours about - but for now, there's a junkyard full of cats, and a city full of dustbins, and a sky full of stars.
Relationships: Mr. Mistoffelees/Rum Tum Tugger
Comments: 93
Kudos: 174





	1. Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer

**Author's Note:**

> No archive warnings will apply, and I'll add other warnings/enticements/tags as they become relevant. I'll warn also at the start of each chapter for any content that I think people might find triggering or just squicky. If I've missed anything please let me know.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Outside World intrudes on Mistoffelees' ordered little indoor life, in the form of two chaotic cats who won't stop breaking his humans' belongings; Mistoffelees suffers a terrible injustice and is deeply offended, though nobody notices; and he begins, just a little, to venture into the Outside World.
> 
> Author's favourite line from this chapter:  
>  _Calmly and deliberately, looking at Mistoffelees the whole time, Mungojerrie pushed the jar forward and off the shelf._

## i.

There was no mystery in the past of Mister Mistoffelees. He was not tossed into the Thames in a hessian sack after birth, nor was he abandoned by his humans after Christmas, nor was he smuggled away for some nefarious purpose or driven from his home by a dastardly gang of dogs.

No: his origins were perfectly ordinary. He was only and always a cat; just as every cat is Only and Always A Cat. And that is enough; because nobody ever knows _quite_ what a cat will do or what a cat will become. But they will certainly be Themselves, just as hard as ever they can.

It was on a bright and chilly winter’s day, not very long after he and his humans had settled into their new home, when Mistoffelees first met his neighbours. Perhaps ‘encountered’ would be a better word; because when he found them, they were stealing lace doilies and table runners from a packing box in the second drawing room.

It is the duty of every cat to patrol his or her house, as everybody knows. Any cat would have been drawn to the rustles and thumps and thuds to know that _something_ was going on, and Mistoffelees had always had a few senses more than most cats. There was an energy inside the room, a delighted and chaotic energy which he could feel even through the walls as he stepped cautiously along the corridor and eased his head around the door.

The room looked empty, though it did not feel it. Not a living creature in sight—mouse or rat or squirrel or possum, or dog or cat, or even bird. But sawdust trailed across the carpet in long speckled curves from two of the wooden boxes, and some of their contents were scattered too: silver plates, a spiky cluster of forks, one white and pink jug whose handle lay sad and alone on the floorboards by the wall.

The third box—cardboard, thin and tall—lay on its side now, with the top torn open and a little creamy river of spare linens and decorative lacework tumbling out onto the floor.

It was from inside that box that the noises were coming, and a scent that was faintly familiar: a cat, or perhaps two cats, whose scent had lingered old and stale in some of these rooms when Mistoffelees and his humans had first arrived. But now it was alive and rich, and it was _in that box._

He crouched to the floor and stared.

One paw, then another paw, velvet-soft and silent as he crept into the room. Circling, sniffing, not getting too close…

And then, one!—two!—bright-striped heads popped out from inside the box, and one—two—identical grins pinned Mistoffelees to the spot.

“Well, I never!” said one, and “Look who’s here!” said the other.

“Who’s this prim little creature?”

“You lost, dearie?”

Their words came out tangling around each other like their tails and legs and their scents as they slid out onto the floor, one not quite ending before the other began.

“Ooh, Mungojerrie, did he fall out of the vents?”

“Maybe he came down the chimney, Rumpelteazer.”

“Don’t be daft, he’s far too neat and proper.”

“Was he in one of the other boxes?”

“Maybe the gardeners grew him in a flowerpot.”

“I bet he’s never been out in the garden in his life.”

Mistoffelees crouched, toes spread wide on the pile of the carpet, ready to spring in any direction, feeling the tingle through every hair as they spread out and began to circle. They weren’t snarling or posturing, their movements were open and their expressions were friendly, but he could feel the tension throbbing through them as well: the same thrill, the same wary attention to every move he made, the same energy barely under control.

Their faces were a trick.

“He _is_ a he, isn’t he? Smells a bit like—”

“Aw, he’s just a sweet and innocent kitten who never smelled a queen in his life.”

“What’re you doing on our patch, kitten?”

“Where’d you spring from?”

Now, a cat, you may think, when she talks to other cats, talks to them as humans talk to other humans. A meow, perhaps, a questioning chirp, or a proud caterwaul: these must be the elements of a cat’s speech, and if the cat is silent then she is saying nothing at all. But cats, I must tell you, have three different languages: and they know exactly how and when to use every one of them.

The First Language, and the simplest, is made up of the sounds that come from the mouth. Even humans can perceive this language, and some _very_ intelligent humans even learn to understand an instruction or two. It is for that reason that cats who live with humans use the First Language more often than cats who do not. It is an affectionate and simple language, and it is particularly useful when another cat is not quite close enough to see, or not old enough to understand better. The voice is used only for the First Language of Cats, and it carries the simplest kind of messages.

_Here I am, I am your mother, be warm and easy._

_Look out, a dog is coming!_

_I am coming into your personal space: I wish to be polite._

_I am hungry and sad but I trust you, can you make me feel better?_

The Second Language of cats is that of the curve of the back and the tilt of the head, the flick of the tail and the twist of the ear. If you are very lucky, it may be the language of one soft-furred cheek sliding in quiet, ferocious ecstasy against yours, and the scent of being owned. If you are an enemy, it might be the language of a bristling shape that leaps up to pose in the moonlight and spit vicious insults down at your face. But for most everyday purposes, it is the language of immediate conversation in all its simple complexity. They will say what they are feeling, they will flirt and play and grumble and scold and say how they spent the day. They will even tell simple stories, all without using the First Language at all—or at least, using it only for flourish and colour. Whenever there is more than one cat in one place they are always saying _something_ to each other in the Second Language, even if it is only “I trust you enough to go to sleep in your presence.”

But the Second Language cannot say everything, for it makes meaning out of what is seen and felt and heard and smelled just in that very moment. It is almost impossible to speak of something unfamiliar and unexpected in this language, or even to change the subject of conversation, because the other cat might not be able to follow your thoughts; and then, too, a stranger may be very difficult to understand, because you do not know their life and the world they see.

To speak deep thoughts, or to share new knowledge, or for anything with more intricate meaning, a cat must use the Third Language, and that is the language that no human can even detect. It is difficult to say exactly how it works; but unless two cats are very closely bonded, they must be looking at each other to understand it, or at least be able to touch.

And so you will see now, perhaps, that young Mistoffelees was very awkwardly placed: two strange cats, slinking around him in one direction and another, so that he could never look directly at them both at once, batting their sentences back and forth without warning and without sound, smelling _almost_ but not quite identical, and determined to confuse.

So he looked at one—a tom, yes, but not much older than himself, with his ruff only just beginning to form—and he followed the queen with his ear, and he said as firmly as he could manage, “I sprang from my basket, under the table in the kitchen.”

The tom cocked his head, and said, “Isn’t it very cold in the kitchen?” Except now he sounded—he _felt_ —like a queen.

The fur prickled all over Mistoffelees’ back, and there came that little rush of energy through him that felt like bright lights in the sky: the sparks that always came when he was agitated, which made the humans jump and cry out if they touched him to make him calm.

He whipped around to look at the queen, who had crept a little closer to his tail and who felt like a tom. She finished the sentence: “What with no humans in the house and all?”

“You must be very lonely and hungry, poor kitten,” murmured the cat beside him. And Mistoffelees looked at her, and she was _certainly_ a she, for one moment only. Then she changed under Mistoffelees’ eyes, and looked like a tom, and her eyes went wide and she spat at her partner, “Mungojerrie, you _idiot_ , he was looking right _at_ me.”

The tension snapped. Mistoffelees pounced.

He couldn’t help it. A shock—and what cat would not leap at a shock? either out of the fray, or into it. Bound and twined between those two pairs of wary, bewildering eyes, turned around and around and suddenly their eyes met each other and not him, and the spell was broken, and he was moving before he knew it.

He almost collided with her, but even as he leaped she squeaked and darted out of his way. And it was almost in the same moment that Mistoffelees was bowled over with the weight of the other cat charging from behind, with the growl trailing behind like an afterthought.

He kicked out, and twisted, and—within a moment, it was over. Though none of them could have said quite what how it had happened, there were three not-quite-kittens who were not _quite_ cats all suddenly sitting as far apart as possible, looking anywhere but at each other.

This is one thing in Second Language that is very easy to understand, no matter what your age or species: it means, “Let’s just pretend that never happened, shall we?”

A cat will posture, and a cat will threaten, but a cat will always do his best to avoid a real fight. Because a cat can hurt another cat very badly very quickly, without quite meaning to do it; and so it is terribly embarrassing, for a cat, to be startled into lashing out.

So Mistoffelees backed as nonchalantly as he could toward the solid, comfortable bulk of the nearest crate, and said to them both: “The humans cooking bacon right now.”

The two intruders looked at each other, mirrored expressions of innocent astonishment.

“You can smell it,” Mistoffelees added helpfully, and flicked his tail in a way that he hoped looked grown-up and disdainful. “And this is my house.”

“ _Your_ house?” exclaimed the tom, sidling left toward the queen—“did you know that, Rumpelteazer?”

“I did not know that, Mungojerrie,” exclaimed the queen, sidling right toward the tom.

“You can smell that too,” Mistoffelees pointed out, and licked at the fur on his shoulder where it had been ruffled by the tom’s claws.

“But it’s been empty for so long,” Mungojerrie said.

“Weeks and weeks,” Rumpelteazer agreed.

“How were we to know there was anybody here now?”

Mistoffelees stared pointedly at the fallen box. And the fallen linens and lace. And the fallen plates. And the fallen _and broken_ jug.

Rumpelteazer draped herself over her brother, one paw on his shoulder and her cheek against his neck, grinning sweetly at Mistoffelees from behind his ear.

“No,” said Mistoffelees. “I can see how you might have had trouble putting the clues together.”

Mungojerrie snickered.

Then they swapped in one blink. Now it looked like Mungojerrie lying across Rumpelteazer, but—yes, the tom was definitely still Rumpelteazer, and the queen still felt exactly like Mungojerrie.

Mistoffelees peered curiously at them, and curled his tail around his paws.

“Stay out of my house,” he tried.

“But that’s no fun,” purred Rumpelteazer-as-Mungojerrie.

“ _He’s_ no fun,” said Mungojerrie-as-Rumpelteazer, butting his head up under her chin. “He’s like a tiny smooth Munkustrap.”

“Oh, I think he could be,” she said, “couldn’t you, Mister Prim?”; and since it was obvious that they weren’t going to be polite and leave just because he was here, Mistoffelees interrupted with, “Are you one cat or two?”

That froze them in place.

Then Mungojerrie slipped out from under Rumpelteazer so that she rolled over and over and sprang to her feet, changing shape again as she rose, and they looked at each other then looked at him.

“Why would you ask that?” said Mungojerrie; and, “why would you put it like that?” said Rumpelteazer.

Mistoffelees did not spend much time around other cats, and he was not always very good at putting his thoughts into words. _Because each of you always knows where the other is_ , that was part of it, and _because I can feel your energy in the room and it doesn’t feel like two cats but it doesn’t feel like one either_ , and, _because your scents are all tangled up_. But that was hard to explain. And so what he said was, perhaps, what he really meant to say anyway:

“Because I’m just one cat, but I can seem like more than one cat. Like _this_.”

He meowed. To his embarrassment, it came out creaky—he hardly ever meowed, after all. But they did not seem to mind that, because the meow sounded as if it came from behind them. Then he meowed again, and made the sound come from the window, then from the door.

It was a very simple trick. Mistoffelees had learned it when he had been very young, and had been rather surprised to find that other cats could not do it. But these two reacted just as he remembered his littermates doing: Rumpelteazer dashed up onto the windowsill, paw raised as if to catch the meow. Mungojerrie whipped his head around to follow each new sound, ears swivelling, fur half puffed up and eyes wide with delight.

Mistoffelees bounced to his feet. “I can make shadows too. Shadows that sort of look like me. Not very much like me. I’m getting better though!”

“Wow!” said Rumpelteazer, and Mungojerrie was creeping toward Mistoffelees with his body slung low, ears pricked sharp and whiskers atwitch with curiosity. “What else can you do?”

Mistoffelees hesitated for a moment, backing up a step before the advance of the other tom then stepping forward again. After all, these cats more than any others would not be scared by it. Probably. And there was a gleam of competition in Mungojerrie’s eyes which made him reckless and excited.

Mistoffelees changed his own body from a tom to a queen.

Mungojerrie paused mid-prowl, puzzled, not realising at once what had taken place. He sniffed the air, then sniffed again.

Then Rumpelteazer launched herself across the room onto the high back of a nearby chair, wobbling there as she crowed with delight and triumph.

“Ha! Like Old Deuteronomy! I knew he smelled a bit like both, I _told_ you so—”

Mungojerrie leaped at her. “That doesn’t count, you were using _my_ nose—”

The chair went over backward, right on top of the fallen crockery.

There was a crash and a clatter and more than one smash, Mistoffelees leaped straight up into the air bristling, the other two zoomed up to a high shelf. And human footsteps hurried up the hallway.

Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer went very still. Then they vanished through the window in a blur of orange and white and giggles.

By the time the Cook Human appeared at the door, Mistoffelees was already there to twine around her legs and explain exactly what had happened. But she looked at the room, and she made distressed noises, and then angry noises—and made them _at him_ , because she wasn’t listening properly. So he hopped up onto the windowsill and told her about the two lines of pawprints in the faint sprinkling of snow outside, which surely even a human could see. But she only squeezed him by his scruff, and tossed him out into the snow, and said angry words at him, and closed the window behind him.

This was not a problem to Mistoffelees, since he could always get into anywhere he pleased. But he was gravely offended; and he showed the Cook Human that by following her around the house for the rest of the afternoon and sitting with his back turned to her, no matter what she was doing.

(It didn’t seem to bother her, not even when he had to hop right up onto the kitchen counter in front of her to ignore her. He was gravely offended by that as well.)

* * *

## ii.

In his last house, Mistoffelees had never gone outside—except, now and then, into the area, where he could sniff at strange objects that fell down from the street. There had been no yard, and the windows had, until lately, always been kept tightly shut against the smoke and stink of the city. Mistoffelees had spent hours watching the clatter of taxis and omnibuses and carts and motorcycles. He had stared at the fat lazy pigeons or the imperious magpies or the brisk little sparrows, but he had never really thought about going out there himself. It was all just something that happened on the other side of the glass.

But as the days had grown shorter and the weather had grown cooler, his humans had not been so careful with windows. They had been left open a crack, letting in the scents that went with all the sounds and sights of the world outside. Mistoffelees had started to think, started to consider, started to imagine: the textures of gravel and grass and sand under his paws, the whoosh of wings past his ears, the rush of leaping across a space that you hadn’t leaped across five times a day as long as you could remember. The white of the moon, flat and large and real, and the smell of the night sky.

And here: here the air was not so thick with the smells of engines. Here there was a _garden_ all around the house, and a fence around that, and his humans seemed to treat the garden as part of the house. They sat in it, and the servants hung out clothes in it, and the two young humans played in it, and there was a new servant twice a week who dug in the soil and groomed the plants.

Most importantly, there was always an open door or window.

Mistoffelees had been slow to explore at first. There had been the house to learn, after all, and it had taken almost a week for him to stop expecting to find something new and terrifying behind every door. He had ventured out a little—found the best places to sit in the sun, the best branch where he could stare down on everything without anybody creeping up on him, the best perches for peeking, ever so cautiously, over the fences into the other gardens around him. He had discovered how to get into the garden shed, and where the mice lived inside it, and which boxes and tubes and cans made his nose itch.

But now the house smelled like him— _mostly_ like him, with the exception of the second drawing room which had now to be put to rights again—and he was considering exploring a little farther.

When he emerged from the house in the evening to make his little patrol of the best spots in the garden, he found that all of them smelled of other cat. Two other cats, to be precise. They had marked everywhere that his scent had been, and they had done it more than once.

This was a taunt.

* * *

“Oi! Mister Prim!”

It was that grin again: almost upside down, beaming cheerful chaos in through the window of the upstairs school room. Mistoffelees took the challenge: he leaped.

Rumpelteazer dodged at the last minute—which would not have been a problem, if the tiles on the ledge outside the window had not somehow, mysteriously, come loose.

Mistoffelees’ feet and legs betrayed him, and even before he heard the scrape and rattle he was twisting and flipping his body over, adjusting and correcting in mid-air. He landed—somehow, and perhaps not entirely through natural means—perfectly poised on the rim of a chimney pot, and sprang at once back toward the window. But it was too late: even as he had slipped he had seen the shape (only _one_ shape, surely) dash in through that window, and now it clicked and latched shut even as he got there.

He perched on the windowsill, lashing his tail.

Rumpelteazer was just there, on the window seat, inches away. She stood up, forepaws on the window, and licked the glass right in front of his nose.

Then she somersaulted backwards into the room. And, up on the bookshelf by the door, her brother sat, with one paw gently prod-prod-prodding at a glass jar full of pencils. He was looking directly at Mistoffelees.

Mistoffelees glared.

Calmly and deliberately, looking at Mistoffelees the whole time, Mungojerrie pushed the jar forward and off the shelf.

By some happy chance, the jar did not break. It did, however, spill pencils and charcoals into a hap-hazard fan shape, curling out over the rug.

Rumpelteazer sprang on them with a delighted cry, and her sooty pawprints trailed after as she dashed from one side of the room to another, batting pencils here and there as she went.

Mungojerrie grinned widely at Mistoffelees and stuck out his tongue. Then he clambered up onto a higher shelf, where sewing supplies were kept.

Mistoffelees checked to be sure that the window was, in fact, shut fast.

It was. So he hopped over to the guttering, calculated distances and angles as the shapes spun in his head, and with a few touches of his paws from here to there and there to here, was down on the ground, many yards below.

The kitchen door was open. It was the matter of a minute to find his favourite, most sensible young Human, and to nudge her and stare at her and paw at her foot until she followed him.

As he bounded up the stairs he heard the little clatters and crashes. He knew his human heard them too, because suddenly she wasn’t following him anymore but running toward the door of the school room.

When she opened the door, Mistoffelees sat down beside her, and looked in at the mess. And he wrapped his tail around his toes licked his nose, and he meowed—just once.

A meow is First Language. Usually, a meow says nothing in particular, except ‘I am here, and this is what I am feeling at this moment’.

This meow, even though it stuttered and caught in his throat, meant, “Do you realise that you closed the window behind yourselves?”

It did not contain every word, clear and grammatical; but while his small human stood beside him and looked around at the chaos and she said something and began to laugh, he did not need words.

The two cats stared at him, and at his human. Then they stared at the window, and Mungojerrie swore.

Rumpelteazer made a great leap off the top of a plaster bust, which rocked and fell. Behind her trailed a long ribbon of satin, and Mungojerrie, laughing now, bounced up and after her, across to a sideboard with boxes of sewing and pastels.

Rumpelteazer was giggling too, as she rolled into a corner and under a side table. Christmas decorations scattered behind her, and she landed with hindquarters wriggling, and poised to shoot out through the door and between the human’s legs. And Mistoffelees would have cut her off, except for the unexpectedly small noise from Mungojerrie where he was trampling along the sideboard.

His momentum did not falter, but he tumbled down from the end of the board instead of jumping; and when he hit the floor, he rolled.

He came up, very quiet and with his ears flattened, and disappeared behind a dresser. And Mistoffelees was almost sure that he had been moving on only three feet.

A little thrill went through Mistoffelees and he darted forward, whiskers searching. The room suddenly felt like _worry_ and _pain_. Rumpelteazer was still laughing, though she was looking toward where her brother had run, and there was an edge of unease to the energy that connected the air between them.

When Mistoffelees poked his face around the end of the dresser, Rumpelteazer was suddenly there; and she did not _quite_ hiss at him, but she batted at his face, and put herself between him and her brother as she sniffed at the paw that Mungojerrie was biting.

Mungojerrie grumbled and lashed his tail; and Rumpelteazer let out a little yip of laughter and tumbled out sideways to land by the human’s feet. She sat up there, and smiled prettily, and twined her way around and between the buckled shoes, and mewled like a kitten.

“ _Don’t_ do that,” sighed Mistoffelees to Mungojerrie, with very clear overtones of “you are rather foolish” and with undertones of affection which were _not_ very clear—at least, not to himself. “You’re pushing it farther in.”

He reached out a paw and patted at the floor beside Mungojerrie’s, silently asking for permission to touch.

His human knelt down behind and over him, made soothing noises, and reached out for Mungojerrie. Two cats in the room put their ears down, and their hackles up.

Mistoffelees carefully put his paw on his human’s hand and dragged it back a bit. She was an obedient human, in simple matters: she listened, and did not grab. Mistoffelees looked at Mungojerrie. Then he beamed.

“I _dare_ you,” he said. “If I’m right, this house is mine. Let her do it.”

Mungojerrie glared at him. Rumpelteazer complained noiselessly from the windowsill. Mistoffelees’ human waited out the careful negotiation of twitching noses and swivelling ears and prickling fur.

Then Mungojerrie uncurled ever so slightly from around the little painful spike in the centre of his energy, and looked at Mistoffelees’ human. And he grinned at her, and scooted around to sniff at her fingers as she reached them out, and he let her pull the long silver and red embroidery needle out of the pad of his paw.

Mistoffelees’ very whiskers said, _I told you so_.

His human made comforting noises and petted Mungojerrie’s head and back. Then she stood up and moved away—and suddenly Rumpelteazer was there, walking straight over Mistoffelees’ haunches as if they had touched each other casually many times before.

She crouched down, and sniffed at her brother’s paw. Then she laughed at him.

“A needle? How did you manage to get a _needle_ through your foot? They lie flat on the ground, beetlebrain!”

Mungojerrie’s tail swished. Then Rumpelteazer squealed, and leaped backwards—on three feet, because suddenly she was wearing Mungojerrie’s body, and he was gloating and smug under the corner table in hers.

Mistoffelees sprang backwards, out of the way as they complained and growled at each other and swapped back and forth one after the other, blurring and twisting in and out of each other’s forms. His human was still there, putting things back where they ought to be in the room; but then, humans see very little, and there was little to be _seen_ really with the eyes. The two of them were so very alike in body that the changes took some effort to see, and they were for the most part just two cats grumbling at each other half in and out from under a table.

It only lasted a few moments, then Rumpelteazer was clambering under the table and draping herself over her brother to bite at his ear, and complaining that now her own paw hurt. Mungojerrie huffed, and brought his foot back to his mouth to lick at it, and Mistoffelees’ nose twitched at the smell of blood.

He crept a little closer, on his belly, and reached out his nose. The worried sparks were stirring in his fur, but they were not very strong. Rumpelteazer was licking Mungojerrie’s ear now, fierce and firm, bumping his head with each stroke and purring loudly.

Mistoffelees snuck his paw forward, fascinated. There was a pattern that they made together: the ease and comfort of touching, the way they were part of each other and still absolutely themselves.

For the first time since he could remember, Mistoffelees deliberately reached out and touched another cat with his paw.

Mungojerrie gave him an exasperated look, through half-closed eyes and between licks. Then he uncurled his injured paw in Mistoffelees’ direction.

That was almost certainly permission.

With only a _little_ hesitation, Mistoffelees put his paw on Mungojerrie’s wrist, and began to lick at the pad where it bled.

“You should purr too,” Rumpelteazer told him, very imperious.

He squinted at her, and nuzzled his nose in against the paw pads, which flexed against his face: claws quite sheathed, not a trace of distrust. The smell of blood was still in his head, though not so strong. But how could it be possible to purr when his body felt so sharp and quivering, all of him thrilling to what had happened, scared of what might happen next?

“Purring is for calmness,” he said; and she said, “Well _yes_ , that’s the point,” and she wriggled. And somehow in a minute they were all curled up together so that her purring shook through all three bodies and sank in deep, through ribs and fur and muscle and heart.

Mungojerrie groaned and tucked his head in between Mistoffelees’ neck and Rumpelteazer’s chin. And Mistoffelees diligently licked the sore spot, and tried to breathe with Rumpelteazer’s breath until his own purr kicked in, rusty and broken; and after some time, between the press of them both, the pain and the panic faded out of Mungojerrie’s body and the purr spread into him as well.

“Your human is very calm,” remarked Rumpelteazer, sniffing at Mistoffelees’ ear.

Mistoffelees peered around between chair legs. “I think she’s trying to hide the mess from the grown-up humans. That chest, where she’s putting the broken things—the grown-ups never open that.”

“She’s putting the spinny ball into a cupboard too,” complained Mungojerrie. “I wanted to play with that.”

“It’s a globe,” said Mistoffelees proudly. “The humans play a game where they have to name all the different shapes on it.”

“It’s a ball on a stand which spins when you touch it,” said Mungojerrie, as if Mistoffelees was very simple. “I could make better games than that.”

“That’s probably why she’s putting it away,” said Rumpelteazer sorrowfully. “Think you can open that cupboard, Mungojerrie?”

Mungojerrie lifted his head and sniffed, twitching his tail. “Could give it a go, Rumpelteazer.”

Mistoffelees dabbed at his face with one paw. “But you won’t, because this is my house and my humans, and humans don’t like it when you break things.”

“We wouldn’t know,” said Rumpelteazer happily. “We’re usually gone by the time they turn up.”

“I remember,” Mistoffelees grumbled.

She caught his head with one paw and started to groom his ear instead. He melted.

Mungojerrie snickered, and began to lick and nibble under Mistoffelees’ chin. Now he couldn’t have stopped purring if he’d tried. Possibly he couldn’t even have stood up.

“Where do you live?” he asked, after a few blissful minutes. “You obviously have humans.”

Mungojerrie yawned. “Oh, not too far away. Three fences down the way…”

“… Then across the road at the big elm tree, down the lane behind the telephone box…”

“… and over the stone wall just after the big noisy Peke.”

“I like that Peke.” Rumpelteazer paused in her grooming for a moment of happy reflection.

“You can drop chestnuts on his head,” agreed Mungojerrie, “and then he runs around in circles and barks.”

“But if you jump down into his yard he doesn’t know what to do.”

“You can just stroll right over and eat his food and he’ll look confused and sad about it.”

“You don’t even like his food, Mungojerrie.”

“I like _eating_ his food, Rumpelteazer.”

Trying valiantly to keep them to the point, Mistoffelees put in: “If you have a house, why are you _here_? And in my garden?”

Rumpelteazer rubbed her cheek against the top of his head, just possessive enough to be patronising. “He’s such an indoor kitty, isn’t he, Mungojerrie?”

“We’re going to have to show him some tricks.”

“We get about, Mister Prim.”

“That,” said Mistoffelees, completely unheeded, “that is not my name.”

“We’ve got an _extensive_ reputation,” Mungojerrie purred.

Rumpelteazer batted at his nose. “We’re _building_ an extensive reputation.”

“Haven’t you got any pride, Rumpelteazer?”

“Don’t make him think you’re more of a ponce than you are, Mungojerrie.”

Mistoffelees patted her paw. “It’s alright. I know exactly how much of a ponce Mungojerrie is.”

Mungojerrie sprang to his feet, eyes and mouth wide.

Rumpelteazer stood up and stretched, and rubbed her face proudly against Mistoffelees’.

“You gotta stop being surprised when he says things like that, Mungojerrie. Mister Prim is a _mean_ kitten.”

“It’s Mistoffelees. My name is Mistoffelees.”

“I’m not grooming him anymore,” declared Mungojerrie, and he leaped up onto the window seat.

He mewed hopefully at the human, who came over as Rumpelteazer and Mistoffelees slipped out from under the corner table. Mungojerrie let her stroke him for a moment, nuzzling into the touches a little, then he mewed again and butted at the window with his nose. She opened it, because Mistoffelees had trained her well, then leaned down to scoop Rumpelteazer up and kiss her forehead. Rumpelteazer cheerfully nestled in against her and scent-marked her chin—despite Mistoffelees’ half-hearted glare—then hopped down and out the window after her brother.

“Be seeing you, Mister Toffelees!”

“It’s _not_ …”

They vanished. Mistoffelees huffed. Then he pawed at his human’s ankle until she picked him up and petted him instead.

* * *

## iii.

 _Warning: this scene contains an implied sexual threat toward an adolescent character._ _You can avoid it by skipping where marked, without missing much more than a little foreshadowing._

Three days after that, Mistoffelees went into heat for the second time in his life.

The first had been a brief, fitful thing, more a restlessness than any powerful longing, and it had lasted only a few hours. Besides, back then he had been confined to a flat.

This was… different. This lasted the whole night, and drove him out in female shape to pace the grass and push through shrubberies and undergrowth and feel the caress of leaves along his flanks and tail, and the cold wet shock on his whiskers.

He tried to sing, a few times; but he didn’t know how to enjoy his voice, and it felt too loud in the cold night air, and besides— _besides_. A tom might hear, and a tom might come.

He wasn’t sure that he liked that idea, and he wasn’t sure that he didn’t. But this night felt like his, and this garden felt like his, and he didn’t really want anybody else in it.

Instead, he danced.

He felt the frost under his paws, and he felt the tug of the moon where she crouched behind the clouds, _couchant_. He moved between the invisible flickers of life in the air around him, between the silvery ideas of the night, and he leaped, and he spun, and he became his own thoughts: complete and sinuous and thrilling, from eartip to tailtip.

And he could see, or he could feel, or he could _almost_ know, what lay ahead of him. As he spun he could almost reach out and touch a dozen, a score of other cats and choices, and all of them were him. Paths he could take—or, no, not quite that. Different cats that he could _make_ out of what he was here and now, at this moment, but they all needed slightly different ingredients, and they would all need to be forged in slightly different ways. And here and now, he had no ingredients, and no skills to unite them, and he did not know where to find them. He was only himself, and always himself—but what could he _do_ with that?

[(Skip forward if desired)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22360339/chapters/53418757#skipend)

Only twice during that strange night did he feel the approach of another cat.

There was a young tom, once, who peeked out of the shadows by the gate, pale-bellied and pale-faced with dark blotches or stripes on his back; but Mistoffelees spat at him, and he fled, and he did not come back.

And then, when the moon was sinking and the cold before dawn was creeping across the grass, there was someone else. Or _something_ else; because there was no cat to be seen, and no cat to be smelled. But everything in Mistoffelees knew, quite suddenly and quite definitely, that another cat was watching him—was stalking him.

It came from behind the fountain, an electric chill cutting toward him, and the fog on the ground curled out of the way of unseen paws as it crossed the border and the crazy paving.

Mistoffelees crouched, frozen with the kind of dread that gives and asks no reason.

A paw landed on the brick by his side. It felt as though it crackled, in the way that no fur and flesh should: striking off something inside his head, and making it fold and bend. 

The sparks crept into his fur, and they were bright. No faint points of light now: they were stars, and even from the corner of his eyes, he could see them dancing, and burning.

The blue-white light twisted around him so that dark shadows like blades fell around him, pointing out from his body where he lay; and there was another shadow too: something almost like a cat but grown monstrous and slender, a distorted black shape thrown out across the ground until it faded into the darkness.

Something touched the back of Mistoffelees’ neck. Breath—hot breath, _living_ breath—huffed through the fur there. Then the not-a-cat scented him: nudging and sniffing into the fur of his ruff, between his shoulders, in the saddle of his back.

It paused just above his tail. Two long, deep, inhales, while Mistoffelees came to the slow and dreadful realisation that he simply would _not_ be able to move, no matter what it chose to do.

The touch vanished. Then it was back, at the side of his neck, at his cheek, sniffing at his eyes and mouth. Learning him.

For a moment he almost saw, or thought he felt, just a glimpse of another cat’s face: tawny pale in the starkness of his own light, with shadows where the eyes should be.

Then it whisked away and was gone; and in a moment Mistoffelees was alone.

The sparks ebbed and slowed in their agitated burning, until they were tiny points of light, nestled below the fur. Then the chill crept back from his paws, and from his legs, and from his body, and finally from his heart—and he fled at top speed into the house, and burrowed into the back of the cupboard, and did not come out until the cook called him for his breakfast.

* * *

Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer did not leave his garden alone. They barely even left his house alone; but then, after you have purred together, you can never quite be enemies.

Rumpelteazer lay in wait and tackled him from behind the watering can.

Mungojerrie sat in Mistoffelees’ favourite spot in the tree by the washing line, and grinned at him.

Mistoffelees ambushed them both from the top of the gardener’s shed.

Rumpelteazer and Mistoffelees worked together to knock Mungojerrie down from the top of the ornamental fountain (there was _no_ water in it), then squabbled over who got to sit there instead.

Rumpelteazer taunted Mistoffelees into chasing her out of the yard, and tricked him into falling into a deep and muddy ditch that he hadn’t known would be there.

Mistoffelees practised his illusions and was laughed at, until one day when Rumpelteazer tried to pounce on a Mistoffelees who turned out not to be real at all, and tumbled over the wall and into a puddle.

Sometimes the other two would not appear for days on end: other times, they might appear at any hour of the day or night, and stick close to his side until the hour when their humans would feed them.

All three of them explored the gardens and houses nearby, whiskers twitching and paws soft, creeping and giggling and falling into things and discovering just which walls were sound and where the loose bricks were, and where the birds liked to roost.

Mistoffelees and Mungojerrie had a few not-quite-play fights over this or that garden, and who was in charge where. Rumpelteazer mostly defended her rights to her favourite places to sit, and to first pick of anything they found. Mistoffelees began to learn to tumble and scrabble and how to twist his body are he rolled to keep it out of the way, the angle to kick so that he sent another cat flying without tearing their flesh, and how to sink his teeth into loose skin enough to hold on, but not enough to hurt.

Mungojerrie had the advantage of weight—although not much bigger than Mistoffelees, he was solid where Mistoffelees was lithe. He also had more experience; but then, Mistoffelees had patience and forethought, and a few tricks of his own that he could not quite explain or control. Sometimes he would find that he had slipped out of Mungojerrie’s grip in a way that did not quite make sense, or was suddenly on his left when Mungojerrie (and Mistoffelees himself) had expected him to be on the right. Or he would spring away to avoid a pounce, and find that he had travelled much farther than he had expected: instead of landing on the far side of the path, he would be on the far side of the garden, or up in a tree. It was all rather thrilling, and rather embarrassing.

It was while they were arguing over a back lane one day that Mistoffelees first heard a name which was to become rather important to him, in his life.

The lane ran down one side of his garden, and on past many other houses; and it was a good lane, because it was narrow and there were no cars, and the walls were wide and thick and perfect for stalking along, and the trees kept it sheltered from wind and snow. Besides that, many humans would put their dustbins out in the lane, and there was usually something interesting to be found in them; and the mice that lived in the gardens would dart in and out in the cracks at the bottom of the wall.

Mistoffelees was very familiar with those cracks. Mungojerrie had just managed to pin him down for almost ten seconds, with his nose jammed into one.

“You can’t just _own_ this whole territory,” he grumbled. He swiped at Mungojerrie’s face, testing. Mungojerrie ducked left. “I was here for weeks before I even smelled you!”

“We like to wander,” said Mungojerrie, all wide-eyed and innocent and trying to slink around behind him.

“Then you can’t hold everywhere you visit as territory. That isn’t how it _works_.”

They circled, Mistoffelees’ ears turned back and Mungojerrie’s almost pricked forward with his swagger.

“What would you know about how things work, indoor puss?”

He was ready when Mistoffelees sprang, but this time he was the one who got knocked off balance and tumbled into the drain.

Mistoffelees sat down to clean his whiskers smugly, while Mungojerrie dripped and complained, “Oi, Rumpelteazer. Why aren’t you helping me squash him?”

In a moment she went from sitting elegantly on the wall to lounging on her back and laughing at them upside-down.

“I like watching you two squabble. Anyway, it doesn’t matter: he’ll let me do anything in his territory too.”

Mistoffelees paused, halfway through licking his paw. “Are you going to help defend it, then?”

“Why bother, when I’ve got you two to do that for me?”

Mistoffelees and Mungojerrie exchanged a look. Then they both sprang.

Rumpelteazer squeaked and slipped off the wall, landing with a clatter on a dustbin. This tussle was brief and very noisy. It ended when the bin fell over, spilling three cats and plenty of garbage into the lane.

“Ooh, a fish!” Mungojerrie tumbled to his feet and pounced on a parcel wrapped in newspaper.

They tore into it, carefully, sniffing and pawing. Ink got on their paws and the smell made them sneeze, and they were laughing, and it was a good day.

“You should come roving with us more,” said Rumpelteazer, as she licked her paws clean. “I mean, not just around here. Don’t worry about territories, you only have to know who to avoid and what not to do where.”

Mungojerrie sniffed. “And who to meet.”

They exchanged a look that Mistoffelees didn’t quite understand. Rumpelteazer wrinkled her nose. “Can’t we keep him to ourselves for a bit?”

Mungojerrie shrugged, and nuzzled hopefully through the newspaper for more crumbs.

Rumpelteazer wriggled happily, and draped herself over Mistoffelees. “Now, you don’t want to go past the end of this lane and out beyond that garage on the corner. If you do that you’ll run into a playground where human children play, and that—well, that’s the nearest corner of the territory of the Rum Tum Tugger.”

Mistoffelees batted at the whisker that was tickling his ear. “What’s a Rum Tum Tugger?”

Mungojerrie went very still. Then he lifted his head from the trash and stared at his sister, very carefully saying nothing at all with his face.

Mistoffelees blinked at him. “Is it a bad thing?”

“Oooh,” breathed Rumpelteazer in his ear. “Oh _yes_. The Rum Tum Tugger is a terrible beast. Twice the size of the Rumpus Cat, and with a mane like a _lion_.”

Mistoffelees bristled up, worried.

Mungojerrie coughed—a fishbone in his throat?—and hastily buried his face in the newspaper.

“But it’s made out of _spikes_ ,” said Rumpelteazer.

“I hear it has spikes on its tail too,” added Mungojerrie, solemn.

“And eyes that glow like a car’s in the dark.”

“You don’t want to go that way.”

“Oh no, don’t go there.”

“You wouldn’t want to run into the Rum Tum Tugger.”

“Alright,” said Mistoffelees, puzzled. “Alright, I won’t.”

He wasn’t _quite_ sure what they meant, or whether he believed them; but after all, he had seen many strange new things over these thrilling few weeks, and who was to say what other strange things might not be out there in the big wide world?

Cats have three languages, but none of them includes reading. Soon enough the alley was deserted, except for a few inky pawprints, and a page of greasy newspaper.

“Food shortages” and “Poland”, said one article. Another declared in small blackletter that Germany had forbidden Jewish doctors, veterinarians, and chemists from practising.

MAKE DO AND MEND, said the caption to a cheerful-looking picture of a young woman converting a flour bag into some unrecognisable garment. ARE YOU AIR-RAID READY? demanded another box, followed by an invitation to purchase somebody’s pamphlet of advice for a very modest sum.

And down in one corner, smallest of all and half hidden with stains, you might have made out the words “… that in the event of… will be no rations for household animals… advises pet owners… animals into the country in advance of an emergency. If you cannot place… it is kindest to have them destroyed.”

The year on the paper was 1939; but there were still spring and summer to go.


	2. Jennyanydots

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Which Three Young Cats have a Night of Adventures.
> 
>   
> 
> 
> Author's favourite moment (apart from the opening two sentences):  
>  _“But it’s true,” complained Mungojerrie. “Mistoffelees is a lunatic. She’s actually a lunatic and I’m a little bit scared of her now.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter:  
> As the 'favourite moment' above implies, there's one scene where the characters shift the pronouns they're using for Mistoffelees. Mistoffelees does not experience this as misgendering, since he doesn't have any particular attachment to any set of pronouns. However, for any readers who might find this dysphoric or uncomfortable, I'll link to an alternate version of that scene with masculine pronouns only.  
> None of the characters openly acknowledge the pronoun change, since none of them find it important at this stage. But I promise we'll resolve the issue in later chapters.

## i.

Sometimes Mistoffelees was not quite sure what he was in the eyes of the tiger-stripe twins: a friend, or a rival, or a shiny new toy.

Some days, however, he was certain that he was a lockpick.

“I told you it doesn’t always work!” he hissed, as he bumped his nose on the glass again.

“That’s why you need to _practice_ ,” said Mungojerrie; and Rumpelteazer offered, “We could just push you straight through and see if it breaks.”

“Are you _sure_ there are no dogs in this house?”

“Dead sure,” said Mungojerrie, cheerful and unhelpful.

“There’s only two houses in this row with dogs, see?” said Rumpelteazer.

“The one with the white chimneys…”

“… And the one just the other side of the yew trees. And the ceiling space runs through the whole row.”

“So if you can get us into the attic of one of them we can get into almost every house.”

“Unless they’ve locked the trapdoors, and mostly they don’t.”

Mistoffelees wrinkled his nose against the glass and whipped around, spinning in place on the windowsill. “I don’t like this window. This is a bad window. Let’s try the next one.”

“Glass is glass, indoor kitty.”

“You won’t be able to work the catch on the next one, it’s all fiddly.”

“I bet you won’t.”

“I _bet_ you can’t.”

Mistoffelees wriggled with excitement and leaped—up to the balcony rail—touching off to soar through the air to the rail of the next balcony while the dark chasm of the night opened its hopeful jaws below—just a touch to change angle and twist mid-air toward the brick of the wall—front paws to take the impact and twist it, hind paws to push forward again in his new direction, forepaws and shoulders facing front, and he landed neat and precise in the middle of the next balcony.

This one had a door, not a window. But the door had glass panels in it, and Mistoffelees peered through into a dingy, quiet room.

Yes. This glass. _This_ glass would let him through.

It was the energy that was easiest to see: energies that clustered around every living thing, as warm and changeable and distinct as voices. But if he concentrated he could see something like that in everything around him, not restricted to things that were alive or even to things that were solid. It was as if there were faint traceries over everything of shape and tone and heat and meaning over everything, all interlocking and indecipherable. And some of them, he could reach out and touch.

Some of them, he could reach out and change.

He didn’t know why some panes of glass were more complicated than others, or whether perhaps it was the wax and wane of his own temper that made it easier or harder. But this glass: all he had to do was reach out with his thoughts and turn a triangle sideways to pivot across a square, and he stepped forward through the pane as if it were empty air.

He leaped into the air and spun around three times, bounced across the room and pranced back to beam through the glass out at the two excited faces on the other side.

Mungojerrie stood up against the door—oh, he was growing, he was _tall_ , that wasn’t fair–and batted at the panelling under the handle.

… Right. Mistoffelees couldn’t actually get up there to unlatch the lock.

He looked around, but the only chairs in the room were far too heavy to be pushed by one cat.

The door into the rest of the house was open, however; and it was the work of a cautious few moments to slip out of that room and into the next, where he could leap up onto the windowsill and puzzle over the latch with paw and teeth, trying to remember Mungojerrie’s lessons. This was a simple one, he knew, but it was hard to see which direction it ought to be pushed. And they _had_ said that some latches, pushed the wrong way, would stick harder and become impossible to undo…

There was a soft thud and Rumpelteazer was pressed up against the glass, wobbling a little on the narrow ledge.

Mistoffelees sniffed at the latch then looked up at her. She squinted through the glass, looked intrigued, then pressed down her paw on the sill and twisted it left.

Mistoffelees copied her.

There was a moment of resistance, then the latch gave way. The seal on the window released, and he felt and smelled and heard the night outside.

Mungojerrie’s head popped into view for a moment; but when Mistoffelees set his shoulder to the glass and pushed, both cats vanished.

It was heavier than he had expected, or perhaps just stiff. For a moment he thought it would not give at all; but then, a slip, and a groan, and a little rush, and a slow steady widening, and two striped bodies were pouring up and over the threshold and bounding into the room with him, quivering with excitement.

Now, as you know, some cats are born with the urge to hoard. When they see something they like, they simply _must_ take that thing and carry it away to tuck it jealously in a special secret location: under the sofa, or in an old potato tin at the bottom of the garden, or in the very back of your wardrobe behind your shoes that you never wear. Each cat will have something in particular that draws their fancy: they might like balls, or shoelaces, or anything that smells of lard, or anything that rattles when you push it across the floor. Some will hoard even more bizarre and impractical objects, like bowler hats, or living mice; and I have heard that there are _some_ cats with tastes stranger still.

Mungojerrie, Mistoffelees had learned, specialised in socks and in pens: fountain pens in particular, he claimed, had a very satisfying weight to them and sat well in his mouth. But for Mungojerrie, although many cats of his acquaintance would have been surprised to hear it, the urge to steal was not exceptionally strong. It was chaos and exploration that stoked his delight; and if he happened to discover _two_ pens, he would not drive himself to desperation trying to fit both in his mouth, or ferry them home with little darting journeys from one hiding place to another. No, he would simply choose the one he liked best, and leave the other one behind him with only moderate regrets.

Of the pair of them, it was Rumpelteazer who simply could _not_ leave a prize behind. Mistoffelees was still not quite sure exactly what qualities it was that made a thing irresistible to her: she seemed to favour things that were bright and reflective and rather small, which broke and scattered the light in interesting ways. The day before, she had found a small coin and a string of bright stones—the sort that humans like to wear as collars—and she had been very pleased with herself. The stones were particularly gratifying because they could serve as a toy as well as a treasure, and she had batted them and kicked at them and chased them for half an hour until the string had broken apart and the little points of winking light lay scattered over the rug.

Mistoffelees himself had no particular urge to take things home and keep them for himself. Like Mungojerrie, he delighted in discovery, though in a rather different key. Now, as Mungojerrie stalked along shelves and gave every object on the mantelpiece a swift and thorough inspection, Mistoffelees, whiskers quivering, indulged his inquisitiveness in much more detail. He had to touch and sniff and taste a thing, to roll it about and see how it moved, to learn all about it and think about how it all fitted together.

A drawer was open in the writing desk: partway, but enough for his head, and so enough for the rest of him. With some wriggling and kicking he squeezed inside, kicking vigorously a few more times to open the drawer a little wider and tumble some of its contents onto the floor. Papers, pens—oh!—a bottle of ink, which Mistoffelees tipped hastily out of the drawer, because he knew how unpleasant it can be. The stopper came out as it landed, and a dark glossy puddle began to spread on the boards.

When the drawer was open wide enough to be an acceptable nest, he sat up, neat and prim in one corner of the drawer, and began to nuzzle through his finds. Three different types of paper—four!—some with writing on them, or stained with ink, and some folded into smaller shapes. They were not interesting in themselves but they lay loosely enough that he could push his nose under them and burrow his head in between the layers, which was curious and pleasing, and which sent more of them sliding down to the floor. A pen knife, with a sharp little blade but with interesting textures on the handle and a shiny orange bauble on the end: that, he dropped carefully onto the desk itself. Three rubber bands, which were new to him: they tasted strange and rather unpleasant when he chewed them, but he found they could stretch between his mouth and paw in a way that interested him very much. They could be treacherous, however: after he had stung his nose by letting the other end go, and barely managed to escape from another when it caught itself too snugly around his paw, he decided they were best left alone.

A fountain pen, there below some cards! Yes: satisfying to hold, and this one had colours inside it that shifted when he rolled the pen back and forward on the desk. He could not unscrew the cap, though Mungojerrie had sworn it was possible, and even showed him how to do it once; and he still had not quite satisfied his curiosity with it by the time Mungojerrie leaped up onto the desk and stole the pen for himself.

Pretending that he had never cared for the pen anyway, as a cat must pretend, Mistoffelees wriggled out of the drawer and clambered up a set of shelves, going carefully straight up like a ladder until he got to the ceiling. He found Rumpelteazer on the way, chewing happily on the leather binding to some ledgers. Two of them toppled to the ground when he stepped on them, joining the spreading puddle of ink and paper. Rumpelteazer batted at his tail and sprang from the shelf to the little fold-away stairs, half closed, which led to a trapdoor above.

There was a jar on the top shelf here: a jar without a lid, and covered in dust, and filled with—oh! _Marbles_. These, Mistoffelees remembered, these were fascinating and fun. He sneezed a few times before he managed to get his head into the jar; and when he caught one marble in his teeth and dropped it from the shelf, as a kind of experiment, it made a delightful PLUNK-plunk-plunk-plunk-plunkplunkplunkplunkplunk sound as it skittered away.

Rumpelteazer was after it in a flash, and so Mistoffelees dropped another one. Soon there were a dozen or more little balls of glass with twists of colour inside, rolling and bouncing back and forth across the floor, chased by two striped shapes—one of whom held a pen firmly in his jaws.

That was the scene when a human walked in, with an oil lamp held high in his hand and a dog at his heels.

Dazzled by the light, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer leaped for high ground, clumsy and crashing, knocking things as they went; and the human shouted, then shouted again more angrily, and the dog charged forward barking loudly, and Mistoffelees shrank back in the bouncing orange shadows and stared in frozen panic.

Onto the desk—onto the mantelpiece—along a shelf—to the desk again—to the window ledge where a precious half second was wasted in discovering that the window had closed itself _just_ too far—up again with barely a hair’s breadth between tail and snapping jaws—back, and up, and around and around went Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer, as the dog spun and shouted its frustration and the human waved his arms and did the same.

The attic—it had to be the attic—but to reach those stairs one would have to leap either from the mantelpiece or from two shelves _below_ Mistoffelees—if he tried to jump from where he was he would hit his head, and the others—even if they could reach the mantelpiece, they would need a moment to gather themselves, to judge the leap, without the confusion of the lamp and—

The lamp.

Mistoffelees knew very little about oil lamps. There was one in the garden shed, but his family used electricity for almost everything. So he had no real experience for himself of how that strange, stinking object worked. But every cat has vast and dim memories reaching back to many other cats before they were born, memories which they cannot entirely understand or explain. And something in that strange dusty store said to him, _that thing is dangerous_. _It is tame, but it contains a power that even the human will fear_. And then, too, there was something that was not memory, that did not come from any other cat but Mistoffelees and his own strange way of seeing the world; and he knew, dimly but certainly, just what would happen if he were to push the jar of marbles off the shelf and then to leap… not up and forward but down, down toward the human, just… like _that_.

The jar crashed. The marbles leaped out across the floor in all directions: not one dozen now but many, scores, hundreds. Mistoffelees landed on the human’s shoulder, all claws out, then sprang across to the mantelpiece as the dog yelped, the human shrieked and fell with his feet slipping in all directions, and the lamp smashed against the corner of the desk.

Red light flared. Dogs barked somewhere outside, and a human shrieked and footsteps hurried toward them. But Mungojerrie was there, turning on the mantelpiece—knocking down a bust as he did so, adding to the clatter—pausing, calculating, leaping, and clawing his way up toward the loft. Mistoffelees was just behind him, but as he turned on the stair, he saw Rumpelteazer—on the _desk_ , snatching up the silver and amber paper knife.

“ _Leave it_ ,” he spat; but she dodged the dog, jumped the flames licking out along the pile of paper and the human scrambling to take off his jacket to smother them, and sprang for the bookshelf.

She did not even land: only turned mid-air, pushed off with her hind feet from the shelf, and was scrabbling precariously at the lowest step of the ladder just as the door to the room below opened and another two humans rushed in. It was a frantic moment, Mungojerrie and Mistoffelees trying to grab and haul her up despite the knife clamped in her teeth, still within reach of human arms. But a moment was all it was, and then the blessed dark swallowed them up.

They did not pause. A fleeing cat knows better than that.

The loft was long and quite dark, running the length of the entire terrace row, with only a low beam running across the floor to show where one house ended and the next began. The floor was rough wooden rafters with plaster and moulding between them, and here and there the humans in the house below had used the space for storage: old furniture lying in rows along the beams, or heavy sacks and bags, or big wooden boxes nailed shut. Cats can see well in poor light—in what humans think of as the dark—but here there was almost no light at all. After the glare of the flaring lamp, these cats had almost lost their dark vision in any case, and as they dashed along the row they had always to leap and to twist when some shape reared up out of the blackness, calculating even as they sprang how high it was, how far they might have to go around it, what sort of surface was under their paws, what all the strange looming objects around them might be.

When the scent of _cat_ rose in front of them, they did not have time to react: even as Mistoffelees spotted the movement, Mungojerrie yelped and fled into a corner between two boxes, and out of the darkness rose the terrifying shape that had slashed his nose: a queen cat, who smelled of milk and kittens.

To face a dog is one thing; but there is something about the scent of a queen in milk that strikes to the heart of a cat, and would make the most reckless of toms think twice. Very few cats would dare to approach a mother’s den before she has brought her babies out to meet the tribe for the first time; and here they had charged at full speed into the very centre of her den.

Mistoffelees accidentally performed a back flip and sprang for the top of an old wardrobe, changing his sex as he went by some frantic instinct to smell as harmless as possible. Rumpelteazer yelped and dived after her brother, trying to hide under him while he tried to hide under her. Their bodies tangled and scrabbled in the corner, while the strange queen stood bristling in the centre of the little space.

For a moment everything was very still: no sounds of pursuit, only the panting of three frantic cats and the low wailing growl of maternal anger rising and falling in their ears.

Then all at once, at precisely the same moment, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer began to laugh. They were mad giggles and hiccups, all release and relief and the sheer delight of escape; and Mistoffelees cautiously poked his head over the edge of the wardrobe to stare down at them in disbelief.

The queen’s growl did not break. But her tail softened ever so slightly, from the stiff, erratic twitching of a cat who might attack any moment, into broad angry sweeps back and forth.

“Just _what_ do you two think you’re doing?” she rapped out.

“Jenny,” gasped Mungojerrie, and, “ _Jennyanydots_ ,” wheedled Rumpelteazer, “You know you always ask us that—”

“But you never really want to know what we’re really _thinking_ about—”

“You just mean _stop doing that, Mungojerrie_ —”

“Or _stop making that noise, Rumpelteazer_ —”

“Or _get out of the saucepan, Mungojerrie_ —”

“Or _put down that newt Rumpelteazer but not on Gus, let the poor cat sleep_ —”

“Fire and shouts and crashes and barking dogs,” growled Jennyanydots. “I might have guessed it was you two. And what _is_ that you dragged away this time, young queen?”

Rumpelteazer’s paw crept out and patted cautiously toward the pen knife, which lay just out of her reach. “Ooh. How did that get there, Mungojerrie?”

Jennyanydots was inexorable. “You take that back at once. You know humans get very attached to shiny things.”

“We can’t take it back,” protested Rumpelteazer, with her most woebegone expression. “There was fire. And a dog.”

Mungojerrie dabbed at his nose with his paw. “You hurt my _face_.”

“Yes, well, I’m sure you’re used to that by now,” said Jennyanydots briskly. “You’ll take it back as soon as the humans go to sleep and that’s that. Now!” and here she flicked her tail, shook herself to settle her fur, and turned a piercing stare up towards Mistoffelees, “Buck up and remember your manners, whoever you are. Come out and let me have a look at you.”

Mistoffelees scrambled back from the edge at once. But there was a quality to Jennyanydots’ glare that made it almost impossible not to obey her—and besides, his curiosity was already winning over his caution.

Mistoffelees suspected that this might be the sort of cat who would say that taking baths in freezing cold water would _build character_.

He slunk to the corner by the wall and dropped down to the floor. Then he crawled forward, belly and ears held low, to peek at her from around the corner of the wardrobe.

_[(Alternative version of the following scene, with male pronouns for Mistoffelees.)](https://whitmerule.tumblr.com/post/190623006430/scene-from-to-be-blind-when-youre-born-chapter) _

Jennyanydots was not particularly large, and not particularly old, and not particularly strong. But she was the kind of cat who always makes you feel that there is twice as much of her as there actually is: vibrating with energy, eyes missing nothing, and making you wish you had washed behind your ears.

Nor did she respect his hiding place. She stalked forward, tail twitching, and walked around him one way then the other, while Mistoffelees pressed his side against the wood panelling and tried not to startle.

“I thought you were a tom.”

“Oh, he was.” Mungojerrie swaggered out of hiding and sat down to groom himself in the very middle of the floor. “He changes all the time.”

Jennyanydots boxed his ears. “What do we _not_ share about another cat before they choose to share it themselves?”

“Ow! But she doesn’t—”

“We do _not_ reveal details of any special skills that cat might have, especially the unusual ones.”

“But she told us herself! Hardly a minute after he first caught us in his house!”

“Right! She doesn’t _mind_ , do you, Mistoffelees?” chimed in Rumpelteazer, who had just finished stashing the pen knife in the crack of a broken dresser.

Mistoffelees blinked at her. Then he blinked, more deliberately, at Jennyanydots; and he crouched to the ground and curled his tail around himself.

“I didn’t know,” he said slowly. “Nobody ever told me that cats oughtn’t to say such things about each other. Or that…”

He trailed off, huddling pathetically, looking as wide-eyed and small as he could, while the little imp of mischief danced inside him.

Jennyanydots sniffed at his ear, and huffed.

“You’re an indoors cat,” she declared. “What have these young scoundrels been teaching you?”

Mistoffelees scuffed one paw over his face, as if he were ashamed.

“… Hey,” said Rumpelteazer. “Excuse me. She’s the one who knocked over the marbles.”

“ _And_ the _human_ ,” added Mungojerrie.

“And _started the fire_.”

“It was all his idea.”

“Breaking in here in the first place!”

“And tearing up the human’s bedclothes.”

“And stealing the dog’s dinner, and tying a tin can to its tail.”

“ _And_ she stole my pen.”

“But I found that pen,” protested Mistoffelees, “and you took it from me. I didn’t know we were going to be _stealing_.” He turned woeful eyes on Jennyanydots. “It isn’t true, I never went into any other room in the house. I was only in the office. I don’t even know how to tie a knot in a string, never mind in a… tin can? And then there was a dog, and a human bursting into the room, and he was so _very_ angry for some reason. And then the lamp broke and there was fire, and I thought we were never going to get out…”

He shivered. Jennyanydots rubbed her body down his side.

“There now, you poor thing,” she crooned; and she turned on the other two with a look that would send fur flying. “Now, see what you’ve done! What have you got to say for yourselves?”

Mistoffelees peeked between her legs. Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer were gaping with indignation; but then, “Mungojerrie,” Rumpelteazer said—and she said it almost with reverence—“nobody is ever going to believe us about anything ever again.”

Mistoffelees poked out his tongue, quivering with delight.

“Taking this poor innocent young thing away from her nice warm fireside,” scolded Jennyanydots, “dragging her into your nonsense, and trying to pin the blame on her! Look at her! She wouldn’t know how to break a sparrow’s egg if she had to. Shame on the pair of you.”

She looked back at Mistoffelees herself as she said it; but there was a twinkle in her eye that he hadn’t expected to find there, something that said she was not _quite_ so taken in as she chose to appear.

“But it’s _true_ ,” complained Mungojerrie. “She just flew through the air right at the human’s face and made the lamp explode. It was amazing. She’s a lunatic. She’s actually a lunatic and I’m a little bit scared of her now.”

“Can we see your kittens, Jenny?” cut in Rumpelteazer, bouncing forward to butt her head against the older queen’s shoulder before Mistoffelees could say anything more. “Jellylorum said you had two girls, I bet they’re beautiful, can we see them?”

“You certainly may not, and I’ll thank you not to get slangy with my name,” said Jennyanydots. “Now be off with you. No,” as Rumpelteazer whipped around and dashed for the dresser, “I’ll keep the pen and I will put it back where it came from. You will go straight home and think about the consequences of your actions. I daresay it will be good for you.”

Rumpelteazer grumbled and shuffled her paws and mrrowled, unable to move forward or back until Mungojerrie pushed her away.

“The window up the other end is always open, right? Be seeing you, Jenny!”

The pair of them darted away as Jennyanydots narrowed her eyes.

Mistoffelees sprang to follow them; but she called his name, so that he spun around on the top of the dividing wall, and looked back down toward her.

She was standing in front of the wardrobe where he had taken refuge before, and, as he turned, he glimpsed a tiny pale face peering eagerly from an inner drawer. As soon as he saw it, it ducked back down out of sight.

“Be careful with them,” said Jennyanydots, and now there was no twinkle about her at all. That sense of _busyness_ that had been almost bursting through the surface ebbed and cooled, until she seemed to be on the point of sleep. “Remember to think ahead, and to think for yourself.”

Mistoffelees squirmed and ran a paw over one ear. He wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but he suddenly did not feel comfortable with himself at all.

She watched him for a moment, tail twitching and eyes unblinking; then she yawned. “That sort of horseplay has a way of getting cats hurt,” she said. “And not only the cats who began it.”

“Yes, Jennyanydots,” Mistoffelees mumbled; and the moment she nodded to him, he sprang away, and ran after the other two into the night.

* * *

## ii.

“It’s _raining_ ,” exclaimed Rumpelteazer.

Mungojerrie, who had landed right in a puddle, shook each paw vigorously and gave her a look of deep disgust.

The three cats stared at each other: one single, eloquent moment, speaking no word in any Language but united in some deeper, wilder thrill which had no need to be spoken. And suddenly they were off, as animals will do. They needed no signal: they simply _knew_ , all at once. They were lifted and whirled away by that shared feeling, flying through the night, running in the elation of audacity and escape.

They slipped one by one by one along the pavement, dancing around pools of lamplight in the shivering curtain of rain. High above arched the sky, smoked over with the ghostly lights of the city—vast, far beyond that tiny strip they could see between the building walls. And somewhere up there, Mistoffelees heard or felt a sort of buzzing whine, something grinding at the back of his teeth. But maybe it wasn’t there at all: not a sound, but only a promise of what was to come.

Their mad pace slackened when it was time to cross a walled churchyard. The wall was a high one, and they took it from a nearby post box: balancing one by one on the rain-wet curving metal, then springing up to run along the wall with the street on one side and a yew hedge on the other. Rumpelteazer took the jump first—then they swapped bodies, and Mungojerrie leaped up in his sister’s shape. 

“Why do you do that?” asked Mistoffelees, when he had caught up. He batted at Mungojerrie’s haunches, just as they were quivering to leap over a crumbled section of wall. Mungojerrie missed his landing and slipped back down into the street, where he made several unflattering remarks about Mistoffelees’ breath and the smell of dog vomit.

Rumpelteazer came bounding back, peering down at her brother with interest as he grumbled and shuffled his paws, lining up for the leap.

“Why do you two change like that?” Mistoffelees repeated. He inched his front paws down the wall, balancing his weight on his hind paws and sniffing down toward Mungojerrie. “And how do you do it? Is it one of you who decides or both? How do you work out who gets to be who?”

Mungojerrie glared up at him, “Decide? We just do it.”

“Why?”

“Because we can.” Rumpelteazer peered down at her brother, then backed up, tail swishing. She pawed at Mistoffelees’ hindquarters, trying to drag him back.

“For one thing,” grumbled Mungojerrie down below, “ _these_ legs are better for jumping. But not _this_ good, you newt-faced little black beetle—”

“Because when I do that—” and Mistoffelees demonstrated, flicking back from female to male “—this isn’t some other cat’s body: it’s mine but different. But for you two, you aren’t just changing your own bodies into a tom or a queen. It _is_ his body you wear, and yours that he wears?”

“I know that his paws always itch on the grass in that lawn just past your house.”

Mungojerrie leaped, and almost ran up the last yard of the wall, to where they caught him and hauled him up to join them.

“But,” Mungojerrie said, “I’m _better_ at locks and latches.”

“No matter which body he’s in.”

“And she’s better at charming toms.”

Rumpelteazer smirked. “No matter which body _I’m_ in.”

Mistoffelees cocked his head. “ _I_ think Mungojerrie is charming.”

Mungojerrie pricked up his ears. “Are you just saying that so I won’t push _you_ off the wall?”

“Would it work?”

Mungojerrie rubbed his cheek against Mistoffelees’ ear. “Course it would, I’m easy. Come on!”

It was only a few yards to the end of the yew hedge, where they leaped to cross the yard. The great grey bulk of the church loomed over them out of the rain; and Mistoffelees’ fur prickled uneasily. Churches always seemed so much taller than other human buildings—even this one, which was barely as tall as the block of flats on the other side of the street.

“The cats you know,” he asked, to distract himself from the feeling, “Do they all know you can do that? Jennyanydots said it’s bad manners to talk about the… the _strange_ things other cats can do. Does that mean it’s sometimes a secret?”

“It’s not _strange_ , indoor kitty.”

“It’s just magic,” added Rumpelteazer, as if that explained it all. “Almost every cat can do _some_ kind of magic.”

“But some like to keep it a secret.”

“You might want to do that, you’re a bit weird.”

“I am?”

“And if they don’t know what you can do, you can use it to confuse them.”

“Like we do.”

“Like we do!” Mungojerrie, bouncing from flagstone to flagstone along the path into a carpark, added a triumphant little tumble-roll in between.

“Doesn’t work on humans. Humans can never tell us apart anyway.”

“Except that one time ours tried to make us wear different collars.”

“That didn’t last long.”

“Oh, no, that was fun.”

“But dogs get _horribly_ confused right away.”

“And most cats try to pretend they aren’t because they don’t want to admit they don’t want to know what’s going on.

“ _Except_ ,” said Rumpelteazer—hopping over the bonnet of a parked car, so that she could cut in front of her brother and make him sit back on his haunches and pout—“if one of us makes us switch while another cat is _looking straight at us_.”

“That was a clue,” agreed Mistoffelees.

“Hey.” Mungojerrie swung around to grin at him, teeth flashing and every line of his body inviting and loose. “You just seemed like a really trustworthy cat.”

Rumpelteazer looked back at them, disgruntled, and shook the rain out of her whiskers. “No, _you_ were just an overexcited boot-head.”

Mistoffelees pondered, tail twitching.

“I was confused,” he admitted, very graciously. “But only for a moment.”

They both scoffed, at exactly the same moment, and sprang toward him.

“You were bewildered,” Mungojerrie informed him.

“Terrified,” agreed Rumpelteazer.

“ _Boggled_.” Mungojerrie began to circle, half-crouched, almost close enough to touch, slipping around to Mistoffelees’ left.

“Awestruck.” Rumpelteazer sauntered around to his right.

“Perplexed.”

“Bemused.”

“Confused.” Mungojerrie popped up again by his left ear.

“We’ve done that one already,” Mistoffelees pointed out helpfully.

Mungojerrie scrunched up his face. “… worried?”

Mistoffelees smirked at him.

“ _Befuddled_ ,” grumbled Rumpelteazer.

Mistoffelees relented. “I was confused,” he said, and Mungojerrie’s face lit up. “You are very confusing. I was particularly confused by the way anybody could get a needle stuck in their—”

Mungojerrie bowled him over.

Three very muddy minutes later, with two cats sprawled out over him and pressing him down into a puddle, he promised that they were the most cunning and bewildering cats in London.

Rumpelteazer licked the mud out of his eye and sauntered off, waving her tail in satisfaction. But Mungojerrie stayed where he was, wriggling around to settle his weight a little more evenly down the whole of Mistoffelees’ body; and so Mistoffelees added, “I’m especially confused by how heavy Mungojerrie is, and how I can still breathe.”

Mungojerrie’s hot breaths were tickling the hairs in Mistoffelees’ ear as he panted. “Yeah? Bet I can do better. Want me to try to take your breath away, indoor kitty?”

Mistoffelees squirmed, trying to paw at his ear. Then he felt a thrill of shock run through Mungojerrie’s body. Suddenly it was no longer a hot, strangely exciting weight draped over his own. It was crouched above him, ready to spring; and Rumpelteazer, who was peering through the fence out onto the street, bristled up and hissed, “Alonzo!”

Mungojerrie leaped a little way into the air and landed spread-eagled. “Is he—”

“If he sees Mistoffelees—”

“If he knows then _Munkustrap_ knows and then he’ll—”

“We distract him, you run across the road when he’s not looking and hide in the park on the other side. Got it? Come on, Mungojerrie!”

The two of them slipped between the palings, and Mistoffelees crept forward, shaking his head to get rid of the rain and the feeling that his whole back was suddenly too cold.

Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer were swaggering down the middle of the street, weaving in and out of each other’s path. Their flanks brushed every time they crossed, and their tails caught and twined, so that in the mist of bouncing raindrops they looked like one ever-shifting tiger-striped beast.

When the big black and white tom came stalking into view, they broke apart. Mungojerrie meowed like a kitten and leaped for him at once, sliding over the wet pavement, while Rumpelteazer skittered sideways then danced around him.

From this distance, hiding in the dark, all the details of faces and body were blurred. Mistoffelees could not see quite what they were saying, but he could see how quickly the new cat’s startled bristling subsided into irritation. The suspicion in his attitude grew more slowly as the twins circled him, flattering and explaining and deflecting, slipping back and forth and around each other and never quite coming within reach of a cuff.

When they had him turned around, Mistoffelees took his chance: shot out from cover and across the road like a flash, over the low park wall and into a border of rhododendrons. Then he cautiously put his forepaws back up onto the wall, peering out between dripping, glossy leaves.

Was this cat so dangerous, or so unpredictable, that he would have attacked Mistoffelees as a stranger? He and this _Munkustrap_ must hold the territory around this park; and yet, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer had seemed to say that territories around here were held loosely, with hardly any outright battles at all.

Mistoffelees wondered how one would tell, if a cat was really a dangerous kind of a cat. Would he simply know, feeling the wrongness in his gut or seeing something twist in the not-quite-there currents of light that hid behind every living thing? Or was it a thing too complicated for instinct and intuition, to know what a cat might do, and why?

The trio in the road parted—Alonzo taking a few steps then pausing to look back, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer dashing away at an angle and over the wall into the park. Mistoffelees scrabbled through the bushes, bounding out to intersect their path.

“It’s alright!” Mungojerrie pounced on Mistoffelees instead of stopping, sending them both rolling into a garden bed. “We told him we were out for a stroll looking—stop kicking me!—looking for orphan kittens to take to deserving homes, and—strictly no more than—ow!”

Mistoffelees pushed Mungojerrie’s face into the grass, then licked his nose. Mungojerrie bit Mistoffelees’ ear, but not _too_ hard. So Mistoffelees sat down primly against Mungojerrie’s sprawling body and began to groom the dampness from his face.

“I said we were walking straight home like good little kittens and shouldn’t be out more than another half hour,” finished Rumpelteazer, sashaying neatly toward them.

“Isn’t she something?” said Mungojerrie, grinning idiotically upside down. His eyes closed as Mistoffelees’ tongue rasped over the delicate hairs on his lids, tickling the lashes and curving over the seal between them.

“And he believed you?” enquired Mistoffelees, with considerable interest.

“Of _course_ he did.” Rumpelteazer looked wounded.

“We’re a _very_ persuasive couple of cats.” Mungojerrie rolled onto his back and lounged there, blatant and smug. He tilted his head, pushing into Mistoffelees’ touch; and the scent of him rose around them in the rain, somehow richer and darker than it usually was.

“We’ve told you that before,” said Rumpelteazer.

Mistoffelees nuzzled in against Mungojerrie’s cheek, teeth slightly parted, tasting the scent across his tongue.

“That’s right. Why won’t you believe us?” purred Mungojerrie; and Mistoffelees chased the vibration of it, nosing down under his chin and against his throat, nibbling perhaps a little _too_ hard at a slight tangle in the fur.

One of Mungojerrie’s front paws twitched. Then it lifted, and brushed up Mistoffelees’ belly.

Mistoffelees’ fur prickled where it touched.

He pulled back, confused. Had there been a trace of claws in that touch, snagging on his fur? But no—nor did Mungojerrie look as if he had meant to push him away. He was watching Mistoffelees with his mouth and his eyes just slightly open; and Mistoffelees felt a very powerful urge to nuzzle back in against that exposed throat—to cover that whole languid body with his own, and feel its heat along his belly.

Rumpelteazer stepped on her brother’s throat.

Mungojerrie choked, and twisted up onto his feet, and swatted at her. She smirked.

“At least,” she went on, “we’re persuasive when _you_ aren’t around to use those big soppy green eyes and—”

“Toadstools!” Mungojerrie swore.

On the wall, silhouetted by a streetlamp, sat Alonzo: neat and tall, tail flicking back and forth, staring right at the three of them with an expression that was decidedly unimpressed.

Then he hopped down into the road and headed off with purpose back across the churchyard: back toward Jennyanydots’ house.

“Oh _no_ ,” moaned Mungojerrie, half laughing, paws dancing nervously in place. “She’ll tell him.”

“She’ll tell him _everything_ ,” agreed Rumpelteazer, “and then—!”

Suddenly they were off again, a mad dash of escape and adventure and freedom from consequences, through the park and behind the church, up this lane and down that back street.

But it could not last: cats are not built to run for long, nor do they take well to _too_ much excitement in one night. Rain will drag down the most buoyant spirit if it does not let up; and it had, after all, been hours since they napped or ate.

It was Rumpelteazer who first began to drag her feet. Quicker to exuberance than her brother, she was also quicker to fall flat when high spirits fled; and her body felt the cold more. Mistoffelees saw Mungojerrie’s little glance back at her. Without a word, the two of them swapped bodies; and Mungojerrie at once shook out his fur, and pawed at his ears in disgust.

The street was long and cold, and it offered no real chance of an open window or a sheltering trash can. Mistoffelees sniffed the air, and cast about in his mind for something useful that he could offer.

A flash of headlights made him jump, and stare uneasily into the darkness of a side street.

“Tell me,” he said suddenly, slipping up on the windward side of Rumpelteazer to walk flank to flank: “tell me about the Rum Tum Tugger.”

He felt the little thrill that went through her, the change of mood, the intrigue and the challenge. Mungojerrie looked back at them; and his eyes glinted in the lamplight.

All cats, of course, tell stories; but not all cats tell them _well_. That is a skill which must be learned.

“They _say_ ,” said Rumpelteazer slowly, and Mungojerrie jumped in with, “ _Hark and listen_ to—no, ‘ _Twas all on a winter morning_ —no, _As I was walking home one night_ —no, _Six Pollicles walked into a bar—_ ”

“ _Of the Nature and Appearance of the Rum Tum Tugger Beast_ ,” declaimed Rumpelteazer.

“Its flanks are long and black—”

“And its eyes shine gold in the dark—”

“And the sway of its hips as it saunters down the street has been known to dazzle the eyes.”

“But it has the paws of a leopard, and the mane of a lion—”

“They say it once tangled up all the traffic on Piccadilly Circus,” purred Mungojerrie, “because the humans driving the cars couldn’t stop staring.”

“Just what shape it has you never will know: he may be a ball of fur one moment, and the next h— _it_ will be long and lean—”

“Didn’t you say it’s covered in spikes?” put in Mistoffelees.

Mungojerrie scoffed. “There’s fur _between_ the spikes. Obviously.”

“So,” said Mistoffelees. “It’s a hedgehog?”

“… No!”

“Spikes with fur between them, and it curls into a ball. That’s a hedgehog.”

“The Rum Tum Tugger,” said Rumpelteazer with dignity, “is _not a hedgehog_.”

“But he _does_ have spikes,” added Mungojerrie, grinning broadly. “ _Lots_ of spikes—”

“And yet, strange to tell,” Rumpelteazer broke in hurriedly, “it seems to have no claws! At least, no cat has ever reported them.”

“—and not just around its neck,” said Mungojerrie, “if you know what I mean.”

Rumpelteazer swatted his tail. “Just because _your_ dick suddenly has spikes doesn’t mean you have to think about sex _all the time_.”

“It isn’t _suddenly_! I’ve had them for _weeks_!”

“We _noticed_ ,” she growled.

Mistoffelees felt that the “we” was a little unfair; and he might have protested, but he was too busy reconsidering certain sensations and impressions, and the brassy notes in Mungojerrie’s scent.

“Just you wait,” said Mungojerrie, strutting in front of them, “wait until you get your first heat. That’s going to be _fun_.”

“Not really,” said Mistoffelees, distracted. “It was more uncomfortable. Like being in a space that’s just a bit too small, so something’s always brushing the tips of your whiskers and you can’t get away.”

Mungojerrie stopped so suddenly that Mistoffelees almost walked into him, and had to spring out of the way, into a puddle.

“You’ve _what_ ,” Mungojerrie said.

Mistoffelees shook off his paws, shuddering.

“I just said being in heat isn’t much fun.”

Rumpelteazer headbutted her brother, something like affection and something like impatience. “Now you’ve done it. Can we get on?”

Mungojerrie was staring at Mistoffelees, and for a moment the cocksure expression was gone. There was something there which looked young, and almost hurt; but it was gone in a moment. The grin came back, and this time Mistoffelees knew exactly what it was suggesting.

Mistoffelees studied him, intrigued. His own tail was flicking an agitated rhythm but he wasn’t quite sure he agreed with it. He wasn’t _sure_ : not about what Mungojerrie was about to do, or what he himself was going to do, or what he wanted to happen. And that was interesting.

“ _So_ ,” Mungojerrie began; but Rumpelteazer smacked his ear, and broke in, “ _Of the Great and Famous Battles of the Rum Tum Tugger Beast._ ”

Mungojerrie ducked his head and slipped out from between them. “There’s a house on the next street—all the humans are gone for a few days. Let’s stop there and find something to eat.”

“Now, this beast is ten times larger than are either you or I,” went on Rumpelteazer happily, “and the tales of all its mighty deeds are heard from—from Ham to Rye.”

“I don’t think that’s a real place,” said Mistoffelees, helpfully.

“I told you you’re not allowed to interrupt.”

“No you didn’t.” Mistoffelees snuck a glance at Mungojerrie, and caught him looking back. “You just told your brother to stop talking about—”

“ _Neither_ of you is allowed to interrupt. For its prowess is notorious, though no cat has seen it fight: it is said that every witness falls down fainting at the sight!”

“You _know_ that as soon as you start to use tail-rhymes it turns into doggerel, Rumpelteazer.”

“It _wants_ to rhyme, Mungojerrie. ‘And he once fought the _Munkustrap_ —’”

“Only once?”

“… Fine. ‘And one day he crept up where the _Munkustrap_ lay…’”

Mungojerrie peeked at Mistoffelees. When saw that Mistoffelees was already watching him, he cocked his head and smiled, all winning and hopeful. There was something a little different about him now, though: head and body carried a little lower, the difference between a statement and a question.

Mistoffelees was not sure exactly how he wanted to respond; so he replied with a very slow smile, letting it creep out over his face and body and never breaking eye contact.

Mungojerrie immediately became flustered and tripped over the gutter, and, _oh_ , that was delightful.

“… asleep in the sun in his favourite nest,” went on Rumpelteazer, as they came out onto a smaller street. There were houses here with gardens and trees, not just unforgiving brick and mortar fronts giving directly onto the pavement; and they all perked up at once, and quickened their pace.

“But _as_ he jumped up,” purred Rumpelteazer, “and he yowled his protest—”

Mungojerrie leaped up onto a gatepost and whipped around to grin down at her. “I _told_ you you’d mess it up as soon as you started to rhyme!”

She narrowed her eyes and leaped at him, chasing him down into the garden beyond. They tumbled across the lawn to the darkened house, and Mistoffelees followed in time to catch, “… the attacker slipped on… oh, some _awful old vest_ , and down from the heights fell the Rum Tugger Beast!”

“You can’t rhyme ‘beast’ with ‘vest’, Rumpelteazer!”

“Well, you do better!”

“That’s your problem?” asked Mistoffelees, leaping neatly after them as they scaled the ivy toward the roof. “She dropped a whole syllable from the name.”

Rumpelteazer hissed down at him, her face framed for a moment by silvery wet leaves. “It wouldn’t have scanned otherwise!”

“He could take on ten Pollicles,” suggested Mungojerrie, fiddling with the latch to an attic window, “or so he would say—”

One by one, they slipped inside. The attic was cold, and a little musty, but it was a delicious dry warmth to three bedraggled young cats. They shook themselves almost as vigorously as dogs, pawed the water from their ears and faces, and licked the water from paws, squirming and stretching with delight.

“He devours foxes for lunch,” Rumpelteazer said, between licks, and Mistoffelees gave her a deeply sceptical look.

“ _It_ ,” Mungojerrie reminded her, and bounded forward toward the head of the attic stairs. “Definitely no humans in this house.”

“You said there were no dogs in the last one.”

“It’s true this time! Come and look for yourself.” His tail vanished around the door and they followed, slipping down the stairs and toward the back of the house, led by the unerring feline instinct for finding a kitchen.

The larder door was ajar, and in a moment all three cats were weaving and sniffing among jars and bottles on the shelves. 

“And if the fox is too old and tough to eat,” Mungojerrie said, patting experimentally at a stale half-loaf, “it kills them by cracking a beehive over their head. With its bare paws. That way the fox is tenderised by the stings and sweetened by the honey.”

“You’re not even trying anymore,” said Rumpelteazer, but there was no note of complaint in her tone. She had found four little jars of sandwich paste, and two of the lids were loose. “Mistoffelees, come here. See, you lie down and hold it in place with one paw, then with the other you roll the lid until…”

The lid came off, and clattered down onto the floor. The smell of fish filled the air, and Rumpelteazer stuck her whole face into the jar at once. Mistoffelees took a little longer with his, pawing carefully until he found just how to make it give.

The fish paste smelled metallic, but it was worth it.

“Oh, wait.” Rumpelteazer cleaned her whiskers, stretched, and jumped down to sniff around on the floor. “‘For weeks you won’t see him, for weeks you can’t escape him’—no, ‘if you go hunting him you will never find him but if you don’t want him he’s right behind you.’ There _must_ be a rhyme in there.”

Mungojerrie, crunching on something, slipped down to lick out the jar she had abandoned. Then he paused, with his tongue sticking out. “Wait, wait, I’ve got it. ‘But the weapon of defeating him and freezing him in place, is to offer him a mirror and to show him his own face!’”

Rumpelteazer snickered wildly, and Mungojerrie fell off the shelf with laughing at himself. Then he leaped up onto the top of the ice box and began sniffing curiously at the seal.

“There’s something good in here…”

Rumpelteazer jumped up beside him, and perhaps she kicked or stepped on something on the way, because the lid sprang up, knocking Mungojerrie off. She balanced on the rim, peering down into the chilly depths.

“There’s a whole chicken in here! And—”

Mungojerrie rolled out from behind the ice box, shaking cobwebs out of his ears. “I think we missed a chapter. ‘Of the Roving and the Courting of the—’”

“ _No_ ,” yowled Rumpelteazer. She leaned down, patting carefully at something inside the ice box, while frosty clouds billowed up around her. Then she pulled a face, and gingerly hopped down into the box.

The heavy lid fell shut behind her.

Mungojerrie went very still.

“What,” he asked, a little too quietly, “what just happened?”

Mistoffelees’ coat began to prickle.

“I _think_ ,” he said, “that Rumpelteazer just locked herself in with the ice.”


	3. Munkustrap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which experiments with electrical theory fail to solve the problem at hand; our hero flees!; our hero is set upon by a gang; our hero has to take a moment to stop and collect his thoughts with the help of the leader of said gang; said leader of said gang just wants everybody to stop being chaotic and not die already; local train dad tells a story which we mostly don't hear; chaotic kids are sent to bed.
> 
> Nobody dies, something hurts. (It's Mungojerrie's feet.)
> 
> Author's favourite moment: train dad telling baby stories. We blame him for Mungojerrie's development, especially for the fact that he probably craves a waistcoat with secret pockets of crime. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for this chapter: panic attack (including going non-verbal), physical restraint by strangers.

The next three minutes were increasingly breathless, and increasingly loud.

Mungojerrie raced around the room, and hurled himself at the icebox, and clawed at its impervious metal sides, and clung to the lid and kicked frantically at the seal with his hind legs. He flickered back and forth between his own shape and hers, and every time he changed, Mistoffelees could have sworn he _saw_ the cold wafting up from the fur, whiter and more powdery every time.

Mistoffelees cautiously balanced his hindquarters on the edge of the shelf and began to reach his legs and body forward and down; and Mungojerrie whipped around and _snarled_ at him, all teeth and bristles and terror.

“Do something, magic cat! You can walk through glass! Get her out of there!”

Mistoffelees lost his balance. He hit the floor in a tumble and sprang on instinct behind the ice box, away from the angry cat and the fear. The side of the ice box pressed in against him, dense and incomprehensible: no shapes he could move, nothing he could change, nothing to walk through.

“It isn’t glass,” he spat, wriggling out, shielding his face and ears. “And if it was, I couldn’t bring her out with me, it doesn’t work like that.”

“Then make up something that _does_ work!”

“Can you hear her? Can you feel her in there?”

“It’s cold and dark and her paws feel like they’re being eaten, is that what you wanted to know?”

Mistoffelees spun around on the spot, trying to remember how to breathe, how to think, how to see. He couldn’t change the ice box, he couldn’t open the walls and walk in. If Mungojerrie couldn’t undo the latch, then Mistoffelees had no chance of that. The cold—could he change the cold itself? That was a human thing, a human mechanism like the voices on the wireless and the… and the _lights_ that turned on at the wall. Because there was power running through the walls, little quivering silvery lines that danced half-visible behind the mortar and boards and wallpaper, and devices like lamps and refrigerators connected to the walls and…

Mungojerrie shuddered. He hunched over, tensing every muscle of Rumpelteazer’s body and shaking his head vigorously.

“I’m _not changing_ ,” he hissed at nothing. Then he rose to his feet. “I’m keeping _this_ one. Stop scrabbling around and curl up and wait, you _idiot_.”

And if each human device had one particular thing that it could do… one special kind of magic, like every cat, but it drew the power for that thing from the wall…

He looked at Mungojerrie, willing him to understand, not quite able to articulate or even say his name. Then he scrabbled behind the ice box again, and closed his jaws around the electric plug.

Mungojerrie was there in a moment, huffing and squirming and hot, and Mistoffelees couldn’t tell him but he showed him. _Pull_ , and _pull_ , and there was hardly any space to move and Mungojerrie was squashing him and there was dust in his ears and whiskers, but then all of a sudden the plug came out with a rush, and the silvery buzz of the ice box faded to nothing in Mistoffelees’ senses.

They lay there for a moment, just one. Then Mungojerrie writhed his way out of there, kicking the breath out of Mistoffelees as he went.

“She’s still freezing,” he whined, scrabbling frantically at the sides of the ice box.

Mistoffelees scrabbled out backwards and stared, tail lashing.

“It’s still cold in there?”

But that didn’t make sense. It was the electricity that made the cold. He’d stopped the electricity.

Mungojerrie sat back on his haunches and yowled: an eerie high-pitched sound, very young.

Then he dove forward and seemed to be trying to dig his way _under_ the ice box, pawing frantically at the tiny gap between it and the floor, as though he thought he might find his sister there.

Mistoffelees stared, eyes wide, all his hair on end. There was not enough air in the room, and the feeling of it was closing in around him, stifling and cold, cold as—

“ _Do_ something,” howled Mungojerrie. There was nothing of the cocky, curious young rascal here now: this was an animal wild and desperate, on the verge of forgetting who and what he was. “Find someone! Get Munkustrap, get Alonzo!”

Mistoffelees skittered across the floor toward the window and back again, not knowing how to obey or how to refuse.

Mungojerrie rounded on him and spat. “Go away!”

Mistoffelees crouched, defensive, pawing at his own face. He couldn’t speak: his body was rigid and frantic, saying nothing but _terror_ and _helplessness_ , and he couldn’t pull Mungojerrie’s attention or his own thoughts into the focus needed for Third Language.

“I don’t _know_ ,” he managed, because who was Munkustrap, after all? And Alonzo he might perhaps recognise, but—weren’t these the cats that Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer had wanted to avoid, at all costs? Were they dangerous? Would they help? And how under the moon could he, Mistoffelees, go about finding them so quickly?

“The Rum Tum Tugger!” and now Mungojerrie was almost whining. “He shouldn’t be far, or Jelly, or— _anybody_ , find anybody!”

Mistoffelees fled: through the window, out into the shock of the cold before dawn. He was up and over a wall before he knew it, then it was gravel that bruised his paws, then he charged headway through a bed of herbs, bruised his shoulder on an unexpected urn, and ran for the tree on the far side of the garden.

He was already gathering himself to leap when he looked up. Then it turned into a back somersault, and he landed spread-eagled, staring into the branches with his ears flat against his skull.

A slender tom was staring down, body coiled to spring. He was tawny pale in the moonlight, and his body was blotched with shadows.

Mistoffelees did not consciously think, in that moment, of the eerie not-cat glimpsed weeks ago, when he had danced in the dark. But his body remembered it for him, and this cat’s face brought the horror back in a rush. _Danger_ , it signalled; and the other tom dropped from the branch to the ground.

Seen more clearly, he was ginger, with a white bib and paws, and his eyes were sharp and quick. He came forward—a few precise steps—and he said—and he said… _something_ , some question that Mistoffelees could not understand, because he did not _know_ this cat, and there was an urgency in his manner, and Mistoffelees’ heart was beating too fast for him to think.

He began to back away; and the other cat lifted his head and gave a quick, chittering little call. First Language and very simple: _Come here friends,_ _I have found what we were hunting_.

Almost at once, a cat leaped up onto the wall behind him. Another shape, grey-streaked and powerful, sped towards them over the grass.

Mistoffelees bolted.

He barely made it twenty yards. A big black-patched body collided with his shoulder and sent him tumbling off course. Before he was on his feet again a gold and white queen was there to block his way, back arched and spitting; and he turned, and was knocked over again, and this time he was caught and pinned.

To be held down and surrounded by strangers is never pleasant. But for a young tom, it is far worse when one of the cats pinning him is a tom that he does not know and trust. At the scent of a strange adult male, all his instincts warn him to keep his distance, for fear of being attacked or just put firmly in his place. And one of the cats whose full weight was now pressing Mistoffelees into the ground _reeked_ of masculine arrogance.

He was struggling, and spitting, and there seemed to be cats everywhere, and he caught just one glimpse of green-gold eyes, arresting and hot in a silver face. He almost got one hind leg free to kick, and the queen on top of him spat a curse, and the tom’s teeth locked onto his shoulder.

Then something must have been said that he missed, because the mood changed all at once. The paws vanished, and the teeth, and the other cats melted away to a safe distance: all except one, who settled a long silky-furred body over his, and caged him gently in place, and—and began to purr.

Mistoffelees lay and panted.

He wasn’t being crushed anymore, and there were no teeth.A nose tucked in behind his ear, pressing the reassuring rumble into his neck and his jaw.

It was a strange tom—very definitely an adult tom, large and powerful, surely dangerous. But there was an odd, sweet note in his purr, and his breath was soft in Mistoffelees’ fur. Something about that purr made warmth sink down into Mistoffelees’ body and cocoon him in something that felt very much like safety. Like _Mother_.

He squirmed, one quick spasm of resistance. Nothing changed: no punishing growl or nip, no shifting of weight to stop him escaping. There was no need, because the stranger’s immovable limbs were placed just where they blocked each of his own, if he tried to break free. But if he lay still, he was perfectly comfortable.

Eyes blinked in the dark. Two of the other cats slipped away, then one more, following Mistoffelees’ path backward the house where—

His breath caught and hitched, and his chest tightened. He began to struggle again, struggle in earnest, so that the sharp cold gravel cut into his paws and his chin.

The strange cat held him tighter, just a little, and the purring hitched for a moment. Mistoffelees felt him draw in a big breath, almost shuddering; and for a moment he had the impression that this great calm beast had a heart that beat almost as fast as his own. But no: he settled back down, with his chin now resting on the top of Mistoffelees’ head. And another wave of that great and velvety calm poured itself through his body; only this time, he could _feel_ it as energy, as magic, and he knew the other cat was pushing the calm into him.

He was so startled, and so indignant, that the clouds of panic half cleared away: just enough to let him hiss, “ _Stop that_!”

The purr missed a beat, just enough for a questioning little “mrrrrr?” And, with language and communication creeping shame-facedly back into his mind, that was when Mistoffelees realised that the other cat was already speaking to him using the Third Language.

“Long, soft breaths,” he was saying, and his voice felt like his purr, as if he had been saying the same thing over and over and was just waiting for Mistoffelees to catch up. “Breathe with me.” And then, “Just you and me. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Can you hear me now?”

But that wasn’t the _point_. Rumpelteazer was in danger now, this very moment, and Mistoffelees couldn’t make himself understood.

Frustrated, he shook his head, ears bunching against the fur under of the stranger’s throat. He could feel the energy still thrilling through the other cat, but everything about that body and voice seemed like the opposite of agitation. He shuffled his paws, bracing against the ground, and arched his back, testing the chest and belly against his spine.

This time, the little chirrup was decidedly apologetic. The weight of him eased, especially from Mistoffelees’ hips. “This is not how I usually introduce myself,” he murmured. “But you don’t want to go over that wall there, kitten. There’s a dog on the other side almost as impolite as I am.”

Now that he was thinking a little, Mistoffelees could smell and hear the truth of that: the little huffs and grunts and snuffles, and the rank musty odour. He shrank back down, feeling the weight and warmth now almost like a shield above him.

“How,” he managed, “how can you purr when…”

He couldn’t finish the thought, but he didn’t need to.

“Because it helps me to think,” said the stranger at once, “and to stay calm. It helps you too.”

Mistoffelees flinched.

“ _She’s in a trap_ ,” he hissed.

On the gravel beside his paw, a grey paw curled and tightened. Claws flexed, just for a moment. But the reply was immediate, and still infuriatingly calm: “And we’ll get her out. We’re alright, kitten. We’re safe. We have time.”

To his own surprise, a sound escaped Mistoffelees’ mouth: a little squeak of protest. He squirmed again, more impatient, more intentional. And he felt, ever so briefly, the gentle snag of teeth against the corner of his ear: a statement of authority.

“Don’t argue. She is safe. Stay still, kitten, and be calm. If I let you go, will you be calm?”

There was a suggestion of freedom: a lessening of pressure down one side, one paw raising briefly then falling again, the touch of a muzzle in under his ear. And always there was that soft deep rumble, rising and falling with half a moan below it, the song of calming and loving and warmth and home.

He was quiet and still for another moment, feeling the breath and the movement and the heartbeat and that queer terrifying, comforting charge of energy that thrilled through every pulse of life of this cat, surrounding him. He dragged it into his veins and he ran that fierce, mercurial certainty quiver through every limb and every hair. Then he opened his eyes, and breathed out; and he felt the other tom breathe out with him.

That was as good as a yes.

The air riffled over Mistoffelees’ back, and, for the second time in one night, it was left cold.

One paw stayed on his, a single point of contact. The other cat pivoted around that point, a dappled shadow in the night, and settled down in front of him. Legs tucked comfortably underneath himself, he looked fixedly into Mistoffelees’ face.

“Are you hurt?”

Mistoffelees fidgeted, swivelling an ear back towards the house. That earned him a bat on the chin.

“Look at me, kitten.”

It was hard not to: there was something particularly hypnotic about those slitted eyes, in the dramatic mask of silver and black.

“No, I’m not hurt, I—”

“You were with Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer, is that right? Are either of them hurt?”

“Not _hurt_ but—”

“Good. She’s trapped, but not hurt. Well done. Look at me. Tell me how she’s trapped.”

Behind him, he felt one of the other cats approaching. The silver tabby in front of him lifted his gaze past Mistoffelees for a moment. Something like dismay or determination flickered across his face.

“In a—in a cold box,” said Mistoffelees. “You see, we _don’t_ have time, she—”

One slow gold-green blink, mesmerising. Convincing.

“We have time.”

When he drew in a breath, and held it, Mistoffelees couldn’t help doing the same.

They let the breath out together. Then the tabby said, “We’ll get her out. Are you coming with us?”

One breath chased another too quickly. “You can’t, I tried.”

The eyes narrowed, and the lines of black chased themselves into sardonic and soft little strokes. The shoulders lifted and fell, one then the other: the slightest of playful wriggles.

“Don’t you know that it’s terribly bad manners to tell an older cat what he can’t do?”

Mistoffelees’ whiskers flared. 

“Only older cats?” he said, before he could stop himself.

But the stranger didn’t take offence. His eyes danced and he crouched lower, and his tail flicked behind him.

“What can you do, then?”

What _could_ he do?

Nothing, when it came to it. Pull out a plug, which did nothing. Stare, run away, forget how to talk. Forget how to—how to breathe, how—

“Stop.” A nose pushed gently against his paw, and his eyes were trapped and held again. “Look at me. Breathe. It’s alright. I’m sorry. I’ll do the deciding, that’s my job. Come back.”

Mistoffelees panted, and shook himself. Then he clawed at his ears.

“Well done,” said the tom, and he rose to his feet. He still seemed perfectly calm, but Mistoffelees felt something behind it: jarring shapes that didn’t make sense in any reasonable geometry, clashing and vast and impatient, ready to break through to get things done. “Will you show me where they are?”

The world seemed to tilt and spin as Mistoffelees got to his feet. He stumbled as he turned around, realising that his shoulder ached badly.

On top of the wall, between him and where he needed to get to, crouched the big black and white tom. He was glaring, tail flicking irritably, as his gaze swung back and forth from them to something beyond the wall.

Alonzo, without a doubt: the same cat that the twins had met on the road, and the same cat who had knocked Mistoffelees down and who stank of threat. But now Mistoffelees looked at him, looked at him just after looking at the politely contained inferno of _this_ cat, he was—

Nothing. Just a cat.

Mistoffelees wrinkled up his nose, and sneezed. Then Munkustrap brushed past him and they ran toward the wall, up and over.

Two feline shapes broke from the shadows under the house wall and bounded to meet them. A third paused on a second-floor windowsill to watch.

“ _Is_ this the right house?” demanded the gold queen. Her eyes were a little wild.

Mistoffelees slipped past her. He was all focus now, and he knew where he’d come from. It would have to be _that_ window there, and if he leaped up onto the water butt…

He bumped his nose on glass. The window was closed.

Of course: there had been no breeze in the kitchen when there had been in there, no open window. He must have walked straight through the glass without thinking about it. But the latch was on the inside.

Faintly in the darkness, in the far corner of the room, he could see Mungojerrie, in Rumpelteazer’s shape: crouched miserably against the ice box, and shivering.

The ginger tom leaped up nimbly beside him, sniffing at the seal of the window, peering inside.

“Munkustrap,” he said sharply. “In here.”

The big silver tabby was up on the water butt in a moment, paws on the windowsill between them, and—of course. Of _course_ this was Munkustrap, the cat who loomed so large in the twins’ imagination.

“How did you get out?” he asked Mistoffelees; and Mistoffelees said abruptly, “You won’t hurt them.”

It came out as a question. He hadn’t meant it as one.

Munkustrap barely seemed to hear. He’d dropped back down to the water butt and was scanning the side of the house, looking for window ledges and openings. “Of course not,” he said; but the older ginger tom looked properly at Mistoffelees for the first time, with one paw lifted in a faintly scandalised expression.

“No, I mean…” Mistoffelees turned awkwardly on the windowsill to square himself up, to look right at Munkustrap. He felt pointless and small, but he had to say it.“I mean… you _won’t_ hurt them.”

Munkustrap’s eyes swung back and caught him.

There was a shock to them: piercing and bright, as if they could see more of you than you could see yourself. Just for a moment they looked puzzled. Then, for the first time, something else flared behind the mesmerising calm of those eyes; and it was something ferocious, but there was joy and pride too.

“They are ours,” was all Munkustrap said, quite calm and uninflected; but it was all that needed to be said. Somehow, behind and beyond this one ordinary cat, there lay a world and a love that Mistoffelees had barely begun to glimpse.

Mistoffelees turned, and stepped through the window.

Mungojerrie didn’t even notice, and Mistoffelees didn’t waste time trying to get his attention. The latch was one he knew how to manage, if he thought about it; and though it was stiff, and the worry kept rising in him again, Munkustrap’s face was close to the glass outside. It was steady and encouraging, and Mistoffelees only had to glance up at him to remember how to breathe.

Then the latch gave way, and he braced himself and pushed. The ginger tom slipped down from the outer sill, but Alonzo appeared beside Munkustrap on the water butt. As the side of the window creaked slowly ajar, they slipped their paws into the gap to pull. Soon Alonzo forced his head and shoulders through, wriggling and grimacing to force it wider.

And since when— _when_ did any two cats ever lean in together, wordlessly shoulder to shoulder, to change the shape of the world?

Alonzo and Mistoffelees half leaped and half fell to the floor, with Munkustrap and the queen close behind them. The ginger tom paused with a pebble in his mouth: dropped it into the tracks of the window, and patted it delicately into place. Mungojerrie-as-Rumpelteazer leaped up, startled and spitting, then he jumped onto the table and laughed, all bristles and madness.

“Guess you really do work miracles, magic cat.”

Alonzo was up on the table in a moment, sniffing him over, checking for hurt. “Where’s Mungojerrie?” he asked; but Munkustrap was already standing up against the freezer, sniffing at the catch and the seal.

Mistoffelees twisted in anxious little circles around one leg of the table, then another, getting closer and closer to the ice box. There was an urge in him totwine himself around Munkustrap’s legs like a kitten and press against his body for reassurance. But this was a stranger—a strange _tom_ —and he must not get close.

Munkustrap dropped one paw, twisting to look back over his shoulder. “Skimbleshanks,” he said. Then he jumped up on top of the ice box, and the ginger tom was there too, sniffing and prodding with one delicate paw.

Mistoffelees paced, back and forth, dragging one flank then another against the side of the ice box. He thought he could almost feel her in there, if he reached his thoughts in and through: a frantic hot flutter of life which might just have been his own imagination.

In the window appeared a dark tabby queen with folded ears. She crouched for a moment, eyes flicking over every cat inside, then she sat down in the window to stare out over the garden.

The gold and white queen slipped down from the table.

“You,” she said, tail twitching. “You can walk through walls?”

Mistoffelees stared at her, wary.

“No. Windows.”

“Alright.” She sniffed, eyes fixed on the latch of the ice box, as Skimbleshanks and Munkustrap pushed it experimentally this way and that. Then, “I’m Demeter.”

“Alright,” said Mistoffelees. Then he tripped over.

There was a little metal flange sticking out from below the ice box. On every other turn he had stepped over it without thinking, but this time, distracted, he had caught his paw.

He stared at it. There was a detail—a detail he had missed, in the memory of Rumpelteazer leaping up onto the lid of the ice box…

Munkustrap thudded down beside him.

“It shuddered,” he said, and looked back up at Skimbleshanks for confirmation. “The lid moved when you touched that.”

“She stepped on it,” said Mistoffelees. “Or she kicked it when she jumped up. That’s why it opened.”

Skimbleshanks nodded, not looking, and his nimble paws finally released the latch. “A foot pedal for the humans. Try now.”

Munkustrap set both front paws on the pedal and pushed downward with all his weight.

The lid sprang smoothly and easily open.

Skimbleshanks leaped clear. Almost before he landed Alonzo and Demeter were perched on the rim, staring down. Then Mungojerrie jumped: not to the rim but straight from the table into the ice box, to join his sister.

There were protests, and scoldings and tusslings, and the clatters and crunches of four cats scrabbling around in an icy trough. Skimbleshanks wedged something into the lid of the ice box and nodded at Munkustrap, who stepped off the pedal and shouldered a footstool closer. Standing on that, he could get his head and shoulders over the edge; and between them, as Mistoffelees danced uncertainly in the corner, they hauled one tiger-striped body up over the edge of the ice box, then another.

Down they flopped, one by one, from Alonzo and Demeter to Munkustrap, to the footstool, where Skimbleshanks caught them and eased them to the ground. Both of them were huddled up and barely moving now, and somewhere in the confusion they had swapped back. Now Mungojerrie was in the body whose belly and paws were sodden with frosty water; but Rumpelteazer’s eyes were closed. She was shivering: he was quite still.

In a moment, Mungojerrie was half buried under three adult cats, pressing in on him and curling around him and grooming at his face and fur. He didn’t respond for a moment. Then his whole body shuddered convulsively. He hissed and struggled fitfully, until Alonzo pinned him down with a paw on his neck and a growl.

Rumpelteazer lifted her head, and struggled toward her brother.

Mistoffelees cut in front of her.

“You’re cold too,” he said, and she glared at him through barely open eyes.

He sniffed tentatively at her, not quite touching noses. “Let me,” he said, inching forward.

Munkustrap stepped over him, and wrapped his enormous body around Rumpelteazer. The fight went out of her all at once. She curled up and nestled into him, pushing her face into the fur of his throat and burrowing all her paws in against his belly.

“It was all dark and cold,” she whimpered, too soft for anybody but the three of them to hear.

“I know,” he rumbled back; and the low hypnotic purr started up again.

Rumpelteazer shuddered, and relaxed.

Mistoffelees glanced behind himself, skittish with so many strange cats at his back. Mungojerrie’s breathing was shallow but regular: that was all he could tell.

“And _lumpy_ ,” Rumpelteazer added, after a moment.

She squirmed, twisting around in the curve of Munkustrap’s body to start licking at her paws. He followed her, nuzzling at her face and ears, a sort of exasperation that made Mistoffelees feel strangely lonely. This was a Rumpelteazer he’d never seen before: a tired, scared kitten who didn’t mind admitting it, and who knew she was safe.

He squirmed a little closer on his belly, torn between wanting to help and the sense that he was intruding into another tom’s space and family. And he watched. And…

Munkustrap’s fur was long, but not thick. It had a strange silky texture: long fine guard hairs, but with hardly any more undercoat than Mistoffelees had himself, so that the outer coat hung sleekly, instead of just adding fluff to either side. The charcoal stripes were dramatic and glossy against the grey, the whole effect was elegant and intimidating, and Mistoffelees found that he wanted badly to bury his face in its softness and go to sleep.

… Munkustrap was tracking him out of the corner of one eye.

“But there’s nothing wrong with your paws,” Mistoffelees pointed out, suddenly noticing that he was inches away from being able to groom them himself.

Rumpelteazer ignored him, licking obsessively.

“Go and see to Mungojerrie’s,” said Munkustrap quietly.

Mistoffelees looked up, and met his eyes.

Oh yes, Munkustrap _knew_.

Whatever each of the other cats might or might not know about the twins and their tricks, this cat at least knew exactly which of them had been where, and what kind of comfort they would need. He knew which body had been where, and which mind remembered what.

And he’d given a direct order.

Cats are not naturally disposed to follow orders, but sometimes obedience can be very comforting. Besides, Mistoffelees felt a strong urge to make Munkustrap look at him with approval.

Mungojerrie was lying with his paws tucked under him and his face hidden in Skimbleshanks’ belly. Alonzo was half draped over his back, licking his ears with an expression that said every cat in the world was in conspiracy to irritate him, and Demeter sat against Mungojerrie’s other side. Boldened by the duty laid upon him, acutely conscious of three pairs of eyes boring into three different sides of his face, Mistoffelees picked his way carefully between them to pat gently at Mungojerrie’s leg.

“Let me see your feet?”

Mungojerrie did not respond.

Alonzo glanced at Munkustrap. So did Demeter. Then, between them, Mungojerrie was eased over onto his side to expose his paws.

One paw jerked, and pulled back in toward Mungojerrie’s belly. Mistoffelees pounced without a thought, catching it between his own and dragging it in against his own chest. Then he froze, and looked up.

Skimbleshanks had Mungojerrie’s head between his front legs now, nestled against his chest, and one of his paws had just come down very firmly on Mungojerrie’s shoulder. His eyes were fixed on Mistoffelees: sharp, and warning, and _very_ green.

Mistoffelees dropped his eyes, acknowledging and submitting. But he also cradled Mungojerrie’s wrist more carefully between his own paws, and set to work nuzzling and licking it back to warmth.

It hardly felt like a paw at all: cold and unresponsive. The toe pads did not part naturally when his tongue slipped between them, as if Mungojerrie was in the deepest of sleep and not even aware of his touch. They did not flex and turn against him, and the pulse running up the back of the paw was weak and cold.

Mistoffelees licked them firmly, almost angrily, dragging the fur backward with each pass, trying on some deep instinct to force it to respond. The faintest of memories stirred inside him—was it his own? it seemed like so many different images, laid one over the other—a queen, a _mother_ , licking over and over again at a small still ball of fur, so hard that she pushed it along the ground with each pass of her tongue.

In some of the memories, the kitten dragged in a breath, and stretched out its paws, and complained, and the blue around its muzzle changed to pink. But not in all of them.

In this moment, here and now, Mungojerrie’s whole body convulsed into a sudden spasm of shudders, and Mistoffelees was kicked sharply in the nose.

Demeter made an exasperated noise. Alonzo leaped back and loomed. But Skimbleshanks began to chatter: paws either side of Mungojerrie’s head, nose pressed to forehead, a laughing expression on his face, and a stream of strange and eccentric storytelling in Third Language which Mistoffelees could hardly understand.

‘Strange’, of course, only means ‘unfamiliar’. Mungojerrie responded, curling his body in around his paws so that the front two nestled into Mistoffelees’ chest and the hinder pair buried themselves under his side. And the rest of his body reoriented itself ever so slightly, to let him listen to Skimbleshanks and his stories.

With one paw thoroughly groomed (though colder than it ought to be), Mistoffelees nudged it around until he could focus on the other. This one was raw and tender. It tasted sharply of stale ice, of things that had leaked out and flavoured each other and had never been cleaned away. The scent had been curling in the back of Mistoffelees’ nose for some time, but this was the first time he noticed it properly. Ice boxes, he decided, with vigour, were _not_ pleasant things, and _not_ places where food ought to live.

Mungojerrie cracked one eye open. Then he squirmed suddenly, hitting Mistoffelees in the chin, and he craned his neck up and over to peer desperately in the direction of his sister.

Behind him, Mistoffelees heard Rumpelteazer grumble: a sleepy noise, muffled in warm fur.

Mungojerrie collapsed back down, softer than before.

Demeter stood up.

“You’re a thoughtless little idiot,” she informed him.

Mungojerrie peeked up at her.

“But you love me,” he said, with the faint trace of a grin.

Demeter gave him a disgusted look, and stepped over Mistoffelees toward Munkustrap and Rumpelteazer.

Oddly enough that didn’t bother Mistoffelees, having her move out of his line of sight. There was something about her that he understood, although he could not have said just what it was. Having her nearby seemed perfectly normal, and he felt no need to turn an ear to keep track of what she was doing.

He sniffed tentatively at Mungojerrie’s chin. Alonzo was draped over him again, licking his ears with an elaborate air of disdain.

Mungojerrie’s fur smelled of the icebox, but beneath that, he himself was giving off deep fatigue, the exhaustion that comes after helplessness and terror.

On impulse, Mistoffelees did something he hardly ever did. He pushed his head in against Mungojerrie’s neck, a fierce and clumsy little headbutt that was also a declaration.

Under his nose, the fur jumped as Mungojerrie swallowed. Then his paw shoved at Mistoffelees’ shoulder, and there was a grumbling little sound against his jaw that didn’t really sound _too_ annoyed.

To his own surprise, a purr cracked its way out of Mistoffelees’ throat. An awkward stuttering thing, and it only lasted for a moment, but he felt very proud of it. It sank into Mungojerrie’s fur, and Mungojerrie sighed and relaxed, and Mistoffelees sat back on his haunches and stared at him.

Mungojerrie’s side was rising and falling evenly now, and the shivering was even too: a constant little judder, not the violent spasms of before.

“… when suddenly, out of the darkness,” Skimbleshanks was saying, “a _Paw_ came down on the Little Grey Cat’s shoulder! ‘What’s all this?’ said the Guard to the Little Grey Cat. ‘A little black face, and little black paws! Are _you_ the one who’s been stealing my coal?’ ‘I, sir? No, sir!’ ‘We’ll see about that!’ said the guard, and he began to go through the pockets of the Little Grey Cat’s _very special weskit_.”

Enthralled, Mistoffelees settled back down, to get to work on one of Mungojerrie’s hind paws.

“He looked in _this_ pocket—” and here Skimbleshanks nestled a paw into Mungojerrie’s rib, “and he looked in _this_ pocket—” the paw tickled his belly, “and he looked in _this_ pocket—” behind an ear, “and he looked in _this_ pocket—” between his front legs, “for the _very special weskit_ had many many pockets, as you know. But no matter _where_ he looked, he could _not_ find his coal, for every time he looked in _one_ pocket—” tickling between Mungojerrie’s shoulders, “the _very special weskit_ made the coal vanish, and turn up again—” running his paw all the way around to Mungojerrie’s belly, “in _another_ pocket altogether!”

Mungojerrie twitched and squirmed like a kitten, and almost kicked Mistoffelees in the face again. Mistoffelees grabbed the paw in his teeth, and Mungojerrie made an indignant noise.

“Foot!” Mistoffelees pawed at the last leg, which was tucked up under Mungojerrie’s body. Mungojerrie shifted sluggishly, letting Mistoffelees drag that paw out and shoving the other insistently in under Mistoffelees’ chest to keep warm.

The smell of blood. Mistoffelees felt the hairs on his own neck stir before he’d consciously noticed it. He nosed at the pads, worried, and when he licked them his mouth filled with rich hot metal.

Mungojerrie hissed, and flexed the foot so that the stiff claws caught at the side of Mistoffelees’ muzzle. Skimbleshanks’ story broke off and he was sniffing at the paw in a moment, whiskers stiff.

“Something sharp in there,” Mungojerrie grumbled reluctantly. “Foot slipped.”

“A knife?” asked Alonzo at once.

“No,” said Skimbleshanks, and took over the task of cleaning it himself.

Mungojerrie, mumbling and indistinct, agreed, “Just… sort of jagged? Ice, I think. Not like a knife, or…”

“A needle?” Mistoffelees suggested sweetly.

That woke Mungojerrie up.

“ _Munkustrap_ ,” he complained, dragging his head and shoulders up to stare plaintively past Mistoffelees. “Munkustrap, I don’t like this new cat, he’s being mean to me.”

Mistoffelees looked over his shoulder, in time to see Munkustrap’s tongue pause, mid-lick, on the ear of a blissful-looking Rumpelteazer.

“Good,” said Munkustrap, and his eyes were gleaming golden slits. “That’s one less thing for me to do.”

Rumpelteazer visibly cringed. She and Mungojerrie shared an uneasy look. Then she wriggled, and Munkustrap rolled over onto his side to let her up.

She staggered a little as she stood, but that didn’t slow her down. Mistoffelees was trodden all over again as she flopped down across him and her brother and Alonzo, and announced, “So, everybody. This is Mister Mistoffelees.”

Mistoffelees scrabbled at her belly, trying to dig his way out from under her. “It’s _not_ Mister Mistoffelees, it’s just—”

Suddenly every cat in the room felt the silent call to attention, and every pair of eyes turned to the queen on the windowsill.

She stared out into the darkness for another moment. Then she turned her head to look directly at Munkustrap.

“My brother has found us,” she said. Then she added, significantly, “Yours too.”

Alonzo sat up, a slim solid shape between all of them and the window. Munkustrap and Demeter exchanged an unreadable look. Skimbleshanks stood, bracketing Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer under his body; but Rumpelteazer squirmed out from underneath him and nuzzled up against Alonzo’s side, looking toward the window.

“Which one?” she asked eagerly.

The dark tabby rolled her eyes, but she was almost smiling as she turned her face to track the movement outside.

“Oh, _that_ one,” said Rumpelteazer happily.

Another tabby slipped through the half-open window, and there was no question whose brother this was: he was as close to her in appearance as Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer were to each other. They curled around each other in greeting, then sat up very straight in the corner of the window, while he peered curiously at Mistoffelees and the twins.

Mistoffelees flattened himself, and hid a little behind Skimbleshanks’ leg.

So he didn’t see the next cat very well, when the head and the great golden mane wriggled their way in through the gap. He didn’t come into the room: just stood there, with his hind paws on the water butt outside and his head and shoulders on the windowsill, scanning the room with deep golden eyes.

 _Those_ were Munkustrap’s eyes. They had the same mesmerising quality, the same magnetic pull. But there was a different kind of promise in them: a promise that Mistoffelees did not quite understand, but which he felt a very definite urge to explore.

Mistoffelees watched, fascinated.

The new tom’s eyes landed on Rumpelteazer as she made her shaky way toward him. They looked her over with lazy attention. Then they went past her, to Alonzo—who hesitated for a moment, then moved out of the way, to let him see where Mungojerrie was stirring and blinking at the newcomer.

Mistoffelees had the sense that there were conversations going on around him which he could not pick up. Skimbleshanks was staring at the ceiling with his tail held very still, as if he were determined _not_ to have an opinion. Alonzo was looking back at Munkustrap, and Demeter’s tail was swishing. Munkustrap hadn’t moved, but there was tension in his back and ears, and his eyes were fixed on his brother with something that could have been warning or hope.

The big tom ignored him. He turned his head to acknowledge the tabby queen on the sill beside him, when she ducked her head and sniffed toward him. Then he inched forward a little to dangle his feet into the room, stretching his head down. Rumpelteazer’s bright little form reached the wall, and she stood up on tottery hind legs to touch noses.

He made an interrogative chirrup, a deep and liquid noise that make Mistoffelees want to roll around in it and taste it. Rumpelteazer mewed, fawning her face against his cheeks in happy little nuzzles. He huffed out a breath, and mussed her ears with one paw, then backed his weight up onto the windowsill.

He looked toward Mungojerrie, who was trying to sit up. Then his eyes caught on Mistoffelees—and they paused.

His head tilted curiously.

Mistoffelees poked his head out from behind Skimbleshanks’ paw, and returned the gaze as coolly as he could. But he could feel his own body giving it the lie: his fur was prickling, and faint sparks were dancing across his back, and he did not know why, because he was not actually scared at all. Or—no, not scared. Something else.

The newcomer grinned suddenly. It was Mungojerrie’s grin, or rather, it was what Mungojerrie probably hoped his grin looked like: a broad and lazy thing that spoke all sorts of dangerous and delicious ideas.

Then Munkustrap stood up, and stepped carefully around Mistoffelees and Skimbleshanks, and looked up at his brother.

The grin vanished. The cat drew back, one ear flicking with disdain, and slipped back down into the garden and out of sight.

Rumpelteazer pulled a disgusted face. The tension in the air vanished, and Munkustrap’s head dropped a little.

Skimbleshanks headbutted his shoulder.

Then Rumpelteazer came mincing back across the floor and ducked down to wind in and out between Munkustrap’s legs, purring ingratiatingly.

Munkustrap stepped aside and sent her tumbling across the floor—which seemed to be exactly what she had been expecting, since she bounced up again at once, and came back to nuzzle his neck.

Skimbleshanks hopped up onto the table and sat there, watching every cat, whiskers twitching.

“How did Mistoffelees find you?” asked Rumpelteazer blithely. “We never told him about you.”

All of the adult cats turned to stare at her, even the tabbies on the windowsill. Munkustrap’s tail began to swish—tiny arcs, as if he were restraining it, but starting from the very base.

Rumpelteazer, looking as if she regretted the question already, slunk over to Mungojerrie and did her best to melt into his body.

Alonzo lay down on Mungojerrie’s other side, and crossed his front paws one over the other.

“ _We_ found _him_ ,” he said, with deliberate emphasis. “We were looking for you, because Jennyanydots thought you might be getting yourselves into trouble again.”

“Uh-oh,” said Mungojerrie, very small.

“Then, when we weren’t far from here,” said Demeter dryly, “Tantomile suddenly _knew_ that you were.”

Mistoffelees began to back away slowly, until his hindquarters were wedged nice and secure in the gap between the kitchen counter and the icebox. He was shivering again, even though he wasn’t panicking anymore. Exhaustion was dragging at his legs, and he felt as though cold was creeping into his bones even as the twins revived.

Munkustrap dropped his head, so there was no avoiding his eyes.

“What is it,” he said, in very even tones, “that I’ve asked you not to do?”

The twins snuck an alarmed look at each other.

“… practically everything?” ventured Mungojerrie.

Rumpelteazer burst into a frantic fit of giggles, throwing paws over her face and ears. So strange, and so _alive_ , against all the possibilities: the wrinkle of the nose, the way her ears always flickered with the indrawn breath, the happy little hunch and squirm of her shoulders.

It lasted about two seconds. Then Munkustrap tilted his head.

The giggle turned into a hiccup, and vanished.

“You have to give them that, at least.” Demeter put in, tail twitching.

“They are creative,” said Munkustrap drily, “when it comes to competitive recklessness. And apparently,”—glancing up under his eyelashes at Mistoffelees, who tried to sink into the floor—“it’s worse when there are three of you.”

Rumpelteazer squirmed, rolling onto her side to bat her paws at the air. “You can’t be angry at Mistoffelees,” she wheedled, rather unexpectedly. “It wasn’t his idea—”

“It wasn’t anybody’s!” Mistoffelees burst out, startling himself. “You getting—getting _stuck_ —it wasn’t part of the plan, there wasn’t any plan, it was—”

“ _Exactly_. There wasn’t any plan.”

Mistoffelees went very quiet. So did Rumpelteazer.

Munkustrap had not raised his voice, had not offered any sound in First Language or hinted at a snarl or a threat in Second. But his eyes held them all, and his eyes burned.

“I’m not angry—”

“Yes you are!”

“No.”

There was a heavy pause.

Then Munkustrap said: “This is about you, not me. You nearly died tonight, and more than once.”

Mistoffelees, unable to look directly at Munkustrap, looked up—and met Skimbleshank’s slit-eyed scrutiny.

Mistoffelees tried to ignore that.

“We’re staying here tonight,” said Munkustrap, “until you’re warm and rested. Then you’re coming back to the yard with us. Your humans can do without you for a day or two.”

Rumpelteazer’s ears went flat and sulky. “Shan’t.”

Munkustrap’s tail twitched. “Try again.”

“You’re coming if I have to drag you by the scruff of your neck,” said Alonzo, much more direct.

It was at that point that Mistoffelees found Skimbleshanks had somehow appeared beside him. The slender tom eyed him over in his little hiding place, then dabbed curiously at his head with one paw.

Mistoffelees grumbled, going as flat as he could and covering his ear with a paw. But Skimbleshanks, it seemed, was a cat who could not be ignored.

He crouched down, blocking Mistoffelees’ view of the other cats, and sniffed delicately at his face.

“You’ve got a home, lad?”

Mistoffelees glowered from under his paw. It had no effect.

“Yes,” he mumbled.

“How far away is it?”

Mistoffelees squinted, trying to concentrate on the question. He would know exactly how to get there, of course, once he was outside and looking. Every cat knows how to get home: it is a matter of following the instinctive pull inside them that says, _yes_ , _that is mine_ , _that is who I am_. But to calculate times and distances from an unfamiliar place is another matter altogether. And besides, if he even halfway closed his eyes, they didn’t really want to open again.

Skimbleshanks patted him on the cheek, jolting his eyes open. Then he turned away, almost but not quite interrupting whatever Munkustrap had been saying to the twins.

“Where does this boy live?”

A chastised-looking Rumpelteazer pricked up her ears. “Fifteen minutes _that_ way, two minutes past us,” she said promptly, gesturing to one corner of the room. “House with all the wrong chimneypots and an upside-down fish on the fountain.”

Skimbleshanks and Munkustrap exchanged a look. Then Skimbleshanks nudged at Mistoffelees’ shoulder. “Alright lad, up you get. Look smart. Let’s get you home.”

Mistoffelees staggered to his feet with an effort. His heart felt like it was beating far too fast while his blood moved far too slowly. It made a strange, floaty effect, as though time wasn’t really real, or was spinning in lazy circles.

With Skimbleshanks chittering and chivvying at his side, he made his way to the window. But before they could hop down and out and leave the others behind, Munkustrap made a little audible trill to call their attention back again.

“And Skimbleshanks?” he said, and there was something in his face that made Mistoffelees feel warm inside. “Teach him how to dance.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 4 will be posted around the end of February, and will be titled: The Great Rumpus Cat. 
> 
> Sorry not sorry. Feel free to submit your guesses in the form of comments.


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